Today, Google announced it will no longer be supporting the Email post option in Feedburner. This means if you are subscribed to this blog, you’ll need to sign up with Follow.it to get alerted of new posts.
This site only has 155 email subscribers on Feedburner. INeedCoffee has over 500. I could migrate the emails to a proper email service, but I have no interest in doing that at this time. If you want to continue to read posts via email alert from CriticalMAS, use Follow.it for now.
The RSS Feed will continue to work. Ideally, I would pull that off of Feedburner, but WordPress has a problem that nobody but me seems to be talking about. Any site with traffic is getting its RSS feed hammered by bots. Since the generation of an RSS feed requires a server execution, it has a CPU cost, which is not free for the blogger. Caching can only help so much. Although not an issue with this blog as much, I’ve devoted numerous hours to defending the RSS feed on INeedCoffee.
You can’t rely on Google. Just look at the Killed By Google website.
Blogging is fun, right? 🤦🏼♂️
John
Apr 15, 2021 — 8:30 am
That stinks. But as long as RSS feeds are working that’s how I get my info about your posts.
Colin
Apr 15, 2021 — 12:14 pm
I’m using the RSS feed and that’s fine.
As for the bot problem, that might explain why a couple of fairly popular blogs I previously followed via RSS switched that feature off; it must have been generating too much traffic. I wonder why bots hammer RSS feeds though; maybe it is just misconfigured RSS readers polling too often.
MAS
Apr 15, 2021 — 6:03 pm
@Colin – I could probably write an entire post listing reasons why bloggers are abandoning RSS. A few ideas that come to mind:
1- there are plugins that steal and repost content by listening to RSS Feeds. This happens all the time with my coffee site.
2- the blogger wants users to visit their site for content
3- RSS is anonymous. Bloggers today want email lists which are more valuable for monetization.
4- RSS is an older technology that users have mostly abandoned. There is less incentive each year to support RSS. Many bloggers today probably don’t even know what RSS is.
5- My bot reason is probably not a big concern for most. Because my coffee site is now 22 years old, the number of bots pinging my RSS increases every month. And they never get turned off.
I love RSS. I want my readers to see my posts. When I surf the web, I want to be anonymous, so I want the same thing for my readers.