Is anybody else having trouble with Google Reader or with the number of their blog subscribers plummeting recently?
According to Feedburner, I lost half my Google Reader subscribers immediately after upgrading to WordPress 2.7. A couple of days ago I lost the rest of them.
At first I was thinking it was just ME and it was a result of the upgrade. Now I’m not so sure. I use Google Reader to keep track of all YOUR blogs, and lately things have been awfully quiet out there in the blogosphere. But today I clicked on a couple of your blogs and discovered some of you HAVE been blogging but Google Reader hasn’t been notifying me.
Anyway. I’m not sure what’s going on or what to do about it. For now I’ll just put it on Zoom’s List of Problems That Will Hopefully Fix Themselves.
Speaking of problems, you may have noticed odd moments of blog wonkiness over the past week, like when Knitnut turned Spanish for a few hours one night. Or when the sheep were replaced by suitcases for a few minutes. I’ve been working – with a little lot of help from my friends – to bring my blog into the 21st century. At some point in the next week I hope to unveil a new look. If there’s anything you especially want to see – or not see – on the new Knitnut.net, leave a comment.
The only certainties at this point are that it’ll have dark text on a white background, and the font will be resizable by you.
And the sheep, of course. There will always be sheep. Because, after all, this is a knitting blog.
I just found you via technorati after searching for ‘feedburner’ – I’ve dropped over 300 feed readers and I was looking for answers. None here, although I feel a teensy bit better knowing I’m not alone.
Eek! I hope you get it sorted soon.
I’m a Google Reader’er and your site looks OK to me. Just letting you know.
I just checked my own blog and my stats aren’t any different than usual, so I don’t think there’s a general collapse in Google Reader traffic.
I’m reading you through Google Reader as well, without problems, so I think it’s more likely the stats.
I use Google Reader for all my blogs and it seems to be alright. I’m definitely still getting your feed and I’m getting many daily updates from other sites.
I try to do the whole feed thing, but always revert to good old fashioned link clicking within 3 days of starting it! It means I don’t always realize there’s a new post, BUT, so few of my favourite blogs seem to work with feeds anyways, and all the feed readers seem to be rather buggy little monsters! I’m forever reading notes to feed-readers on various people’s blogs apologizing for something not working right for them!
When they develop a feed-reader that will read things PROPERLY, and consistently, then I’ll jump on the bandwagon! 😛
Edit: I LOVE the edit feature! Hooray!
Maybe the people who look after updating your feed reader can’t get to work because of the bus strike…
With your blog look, the only suggestions I have are maybe put the “Posted to” and “Recommend this at” information at the bottom of your posts, put the archives into a drop-down menu and maybe bold and highlight “salted lithium” in your blogroll. Red would be cool.
I think a lot of Google Reader ‘readers’ are spam robots, doing things like grabbing random content to use in spam emails.
By putting some real text in spam emails and blogs, it makes it less obvious to automated search functions that they are actually designed to sell something.
Here is a WordPress plugin that tries to deal with some kinds of spam bots.
On an unrelated note, I personally find the way your ‘share’ button enlarges when the cursor happens to wander across it quite distracting. Maybe you could find a layout that doesn’t need to expand, or introduce a bit of a delay.
I feel the same about the share button…drives me crazy…Milan is just being polite, whereas, I don’t have to.
This is a knitting blog? Really?
When Milan says spam robots I imagine a robot made of lunch meat.
Is that wrong?
I think there may be a problem with Feedburner. I don’t use it for my blog, but I do have Wondermark(.com – an hilarious webcomic) in my Yahoo RSS feed, and it uses a Feedburner feed. In my Yahoo page, the RSS feed says that the last update was in October, when if I open the RSS feed in Firefox it shows the current comics.
– RG>
I already know what the new theme will look like.. but I’m not telling 😉
(Well.. I have an IDEA of what it will look like)
Zoom,
I dont use a feed reader but I did have a problem a couple of days back when I tried to link to your blog and it told me to go away because I was trying to spam it or something like that. I dont remember the actual words. Hope this helps.
Megan
Thanks for all the feedback on the google reader thing. I felt kind of funny blogging about it, because it was kind of like saying “Please let me know if you don’t see this.”
Anyway, I’m glad some of you at least aren’t experiencing any problems. And it’s good to see some unfamiliar faces here in the comments too. (Welcome.)
Arden, it’s a truly dedicated reader who can remember to visit without her blog reader reminding her of my blog’s existence. Thank you.
Gabriel, I’ll look into how easy or difficult it would be to implement your suggestions – I like the idea of moving those things to the bottom of each post.
Milan and Deb, yes, good point, that thing drives me to distraction too. I’ll move it. I might even dispose of it.
Leanne, yes, of course it’s a knitting blog! The sheep are a dead giveaway.
Hella Stella, I love you dearly but sometimes I worry.
Hi Real Grouchy. If it’s just one blog doing that, I’d blame the one blog. However, if it’s happening to a lot of them, I’d blame Feedburner. (Have you tried telling the Wondermark blogger? If it were me, I’d want to know.)
Scott – you’ve had a privileged peek under the sheep’s clothing. 😉
Megan – I’m glad you came back after my blog treated you so rudely!
Thought you might like to know that Sharp Reader can’t decode punctuation in your comments. Yours is the only site where this happens, and only since your upgrade.
Like this:
“Anyway, I’m glad some of you at least aren’t experiencing any problems. And it’s good to see some unfamiliar faces here in the comments too. (Welcome.)
Arden, it’s a truly dedicated reader who can remember to visit without her blog reader reminding her of my blog’s existence. Thank you.”
Like that. Maybe there’s an option for you to try changing the encoding of your comments?
(Well, of course you can’t see it. Your site decodes comments fine. It’s Sharp reader that doesn’t.)
I’d have to post a screenshot for you to see what Sharp Reader does with the punctuation. Never mind.