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Moved: Feedburner Migration With Glitches

Feedburner started as a cool new blog feed management/reporting service a few years ago, and quickly became a de facto standard.  A quick scan of my Feed Reader shows hardly anything but Feedburner.  Since Google acquired the company almost two years ago, we haven’t seen a lot of new services – but that does not change the almost monopoly status.  Feedburner rules the market, and I’m no exception.

A few months ago Google started to migrate accounts – first only those who wanted to run Adsense in their feeds.  Since I don’t care for advertising, I did not bother first, but knew the day would come: the final deadline is February 28th, but anyone can move to the new servers on their own schedule. 

Seeing all the negative buzz on Twitter I was planning to wait – but then I “lost” 70% of my subscribers even with the old setup, so I figured I might as well take the plunge. And here it is now: a shiny, brand new (old) feed @ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/zoli

Google says (FAQ) the stats will “recover” in about a week.  Funny thing is, the one service entirely missing from the reports is Google’s very own Reader.  I certainly hope this “loss” is only in the stats, and readers are receiving our feed without interruption.   If you are, you don’t have to do anything, the old Feedburner URL will continue to be redirected, says Google.  Then again, if you’re cautious (like I am), or perhaps are not following our feed yet, you might as well grab the new feed here.

Either way, thanks for reading my Blog.

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Google Reader Offline: Smart Yet Dumb

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

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

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