FeedBurner Loses Half Your Subscribers

Blogging, SaaS August 15th, 2008

Check your FeedBurner stats, but don’t worry too much: no, there was no mass exodus, you did not lose more than half your subscribers overnight.

There’s a simple explanation: FeedBurner is missing Google FeedFetcher stats- that’s the number of users who read your blog in Google Reader.  Last time I reported the same, Google Reader represented about 40% of my readership- apparently now it’s about 60%. 

Ironically it happens on the day when FeedBurner is in the news for launching  AdSense for feeds.

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Oops…Gmail Has a Penalty Button

Personal Productivity, SaaS July 18th, 2008

Gears-enabling Gmail will be great, for those “unconnected” moments (hours), and I certainly hope they will avoid dumb mistakes that made Google Reader almost useless offline.

But for now, all I wish is a little more reliabilty.  Formerly rock-solid Gmail has been ill a lot lately.  The “Oops…the system encountered a problem (#500) – Retrying in 1:30” error message has became a daily occurance… in fact several times a day.

A minute and half is not that much – except that it’s not only waiting for the requested operation, it freezes up Gmail entirely.  So if you’re impatient, you’ll inevitable click the “Retry now” button. After all, that’s whay it’s there, isn’t it?

Wrong!  You’ve just found Gmail’s penalty button!  Every time you click it, the wait counter increases by a minute.

Still want to work, rather than go for coffee?  The only solution is to completely close the browser tab – sometimes the entire browser – then log back into Gmail again.

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Google Reader Offline: Smart Yet Dumb

Blogging, Personal Productivity, SaaS February 26th, 2008

Yes, it’s great to be able to download my feed items and read it on the plane without Internet connection (since I am not flying Virgin). I even “starred” some entries I want to respond to.But why can’t I mark items “read”? It’s an “online only” action – that does not make sense. When I go back online, Google Reader will perform synchronization anyway; why could it not remember “read” status and sync it?

The above rant is half a year old. I typed it up and decided not to post it. Now I am finding myself offline for a few days again, and can’t believe Google still hasn’t fixed this shortcoming.

Why is it a big deal? If you have hundreds of items in your Reader, I seriously doubt you will use Expanded View and scroll through everything. I found the only way to stay productive with Reader is to use List View, scan titles (OK, a combination of titles and author), and when all done, click “Mark all as read”. I don’t want to reprocess the same items again and again.

The error message says I can do this once I am connected again. But it’s too late, by then my Reader list will be a mix of already seen and new items. In other words, I am scr***d.

What really baffles me though is that I haven’t found any references to this problem online. Am I the only one finding this a major productivity killer? smile_sad

Update (3/14): Now that ReadBurner, a cool tool to determine the most shared items in Google Reader became the news du jur, let me just point out that you can’t mark an item ’shared’ while offline, either. Not as frustrating as losing “read”status, just an annoyance. Google, please fix Reader!

Related posts: Unofficial ReadBurner, louisgray.com, Adam Ostrow, CenterNetworks and SheGeeks

Update (12/21/08):  Google Reader Seems Buggy as Heck

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Shared Link Blog Not in My Feed

Blogging December 3rd, 2007

It just dawned on me that I’ve never announced my Shared Link Blog, so most of my regular feed readers don’t know about it. It’s a selection of items from my Google Feed Reader, has it’s own URL, and while it’s not included in my feed, if you click back to the blog, you can see the current items in the sidebar:

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No, the BMW did Not Crash

Humor December 2nd, 2007

It’s funny how your feed reader can juxtapose random, unrelated items, yet making them look like a thread:

Jeff Nolan discusses how BMW is experimenting with the IP protocol to network automotive controllers.

The engineers found that IP could well suit the real-time requirements even of safety-critical applications.

Jeff’s conclusion:

In many ways modern cars are beginning to resemble PCs with standard I/O and integrated networking.

(Mumbling to myself: that’s what I said when I made the lifetime mistake of buying a first-model-year Volvo S80 T6 in 1999 … not a car, but a computer network on wheels. Consequently, nobody knew how to fix it)

But, no, I am not talking about the BMW Crash just below Jeff’s post… it’s just a Big, Fat Billboard, publicly crashing on Times Square. Feed Readers have their funny ways smile_wink

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