Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Operational Note: About Email and Blog Reader Feeds

An operational note.

This blog is based on the Google/Blogger website, which is integrated with Feedburner.

At the top right of my blog, you should see an orange plug-in and link for Feedburner:


The little orange symbol should take you to a separate website, feeds.feedburner.com, which lets you subscribe to Discoveries in Health Policy either by email or by a news reader (e.g. Feedly).


The Feedburner system stopped sending both blog feeds and email feeds for some users on June 16.  

It seems to be operating again now.   

We'll keep an eye on it.

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Feedburner $100M Zombie

Apparently Google acquired Feedburner for $100M in 2017 (here) and it is today considered a zombie (here) which periodically stops working (here).

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Nerd Notes: The Three Views of Your Feeds at Three Different Websites

(1) Feeds.feedburner.com The public face of Feedburner appears to be feeds.feedburner.com such as my own blog there, seen here.   When you click on the happy little orange icon, this is where you land.  This is what they want you to see.  If you're an interested reader, and you've picked a blog, and clicked the little orange icon, here's where you put your email and here's all you need to see:

(2) Feedburner.google.com  If you run a Blogger.com account at Google you can get another view of Feedburner at this website: https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds .  Where you can "analyze and optimize" your Feedburner settings, but note it's at "google.com" instead of "feedburner.com."  "Feedburner-dot-google" looks like this:

  

In 10/2020, on this website, at Analyze/Subscribers, I think it's telling me it knows about 68 readers from "feeder" or "blog reader" locations, and 247 from direct email subscription.  Note also there are tabs here for "optimize" and "troubleshootize."

(3) Blogger.com > Settings > Feed.  A third line of attack is via blogger.com where I write and edit DIHP, working from the main editor page, left side, under Settings, under about the 12th type of setting (ten screens downward), which is "site feed" [options].


(4) The short summary is, when the subscription and feed/read system breaks and stops working, most authors will feel pretty clueless where to look, where to start, or what to do.   Apparently it's a known thing that Feedburner accounts can just die for no reason and need to be jiggled or toggled on and off to restart.    

(5) I think what I did this time was go to my blogger.com (#3 above), and click Settings, and scroll way down to Allow Blog Feed, and set the sub-option "Blog Post Feed" to "Short.  I think this started my 250 email subscribers getting their daily email again.

When blog feed is "short" it grays-out several of the other options.