Feedburner Help: Redirecting Old Feeds

BLOGitse wrote to me asking how to get readers to update their subscription to reflect her new platform’s RSS feed. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about blogging it’s that as loveable as they are, you cannot depend on your readers to take action and update their contact information, bookmarks or RSS feeds. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they’re busy, suddenly you’re no longer updating and they don’t have time to figure out why.

Whenever possible, you need to help out your readers by redirecting the old feed to the new URL automatically. If you’re hosting everything on your own server, you can redirect via .htaccess fairly easily. (Just do a Google search).

If your old blog is set up on Feedburner, it’s even easier. If you’re not using Feedburner for your RSS subscriptions – you should. It’s powerful and there are many benefits. Go sign up and follow directions to install for your blogging platform.

If you’re already set up in Feedburner, you have a couple of options. Just navigate to your feed’s dashboard and take note of the links right below the title.

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Popularity: 13%

Problogger Site Tracking Introduction

For the SITSGirls Problogger 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Summer Challenge, prompted by Jennifer of She’s a Fat Chick who provided a wonderful and simple tool in the Stat Tracker Spreadsheet, I’m going to be keeping my site stats and I will update them here weekly so you can follow along. I’ve started a discussion on SITS also, so if you want to come and share, please visit the Site Tracking to Date thread! For those who are new to site statistics, I am also including a brief explanation of what each line on my spreadsheet is tracking exactly!

I’m using Google Documents instead of Excel to keep track of my stats, so I can access them anywhere and anytime!

I’m actually quite pleased with my stats for this blog being actively worked on for less than a full quarter!

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Popularity: 3%

Managing Your RSS Feeds with Google Reader and Feedly

Very little of my time is actually spent on photography. I’ll go out and shoot and maybe take 30 minutes tops. Usually it’s a picture here and there and of course, unlike some of the other stuff I’m about to mention, I can do it while living my life.

The time I get to myself amounts to a few hours a day. During that time, I’m editing photographs, writing blog posts (yeah, I actually put some thought into these things!) and reading blogs. I may spend more time reading blogs than the other two combined. Truly, I subscribe to every great blog I come across. There is an abundance of wealth and information out there from all different viewpoints! It would be a pity to exclude one because I think I might not get the time to read it. So I subscribe, subscribe, subscribe.

Using a feed reader will allow you to quickly read through hundreds of blogs a day! On average, I can read through updates from about 50 blogs in 30 minutes and that includes the amount of time I take to comment. But I do see some confusion as to how to set it up and how to make sure your site has it. This article shares how to quickly set up subscriptions in Google Reader and ways you can use Google Reader and Feedly to make your blog surfing fun and efficient.

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Popularity: 8%