Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Really odd but since I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 the number of subscribers to my blog has roughly halved. Today it is reading 632. It hasn’t been below 1,000 in at least 6 months never mind down at the 600 mark.

I realise that this is likely due to my moving to the newer FeedBurner (FeedSmith) plugin which required me to setup a new feed in FeedBurner but as you can see from the screenshot above, the old feed is reading 0 subscribers!

I put a 301 re-direct on the old feedburner plugin’s feed from this blog but what I am curious about is that the Subscribe address for this blog (tomrafteryit.net/feed) hasn’t changed at all. Do people subscribe directly to the FeedBurner feed address?

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Sean McNamara alerted me via the comments on this blog that my RSS feed was broken (thanks a million Sean). I sorted that out this morning so it should be good again and Google Reader is certainly having no problem seeing my posts now.

So what happened? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure (!) but I think it had more to do with my FeedBurner account than WordPress, per se.

The sequence of events was along the lines of

• I checked the WordPRess 2.3 plugin compatibility page and realised my old, fully functioning FeedBurner plugin needed to be updated
• I uploaded the new plugin and activated it (having deleted the old one)
• I did the rest of the upgrade and fixed issues as they arose

Then I saw Sean’s comment. Uh oh! I went over to Google Reader and sure enough no posts for the last couple of days were present, d’oh!

I checked back my FeedBurner Plugin config and while all seemed ok, when I checked the “create a FeedBurner feed for …” link, it looks like that the updated plugin created a new feed for the blog.

This meant I had to head over to the FeedBurner site and set up the new feed from scratch – a considerable annoyance. All my stats on my old feed are no longer associated with the new one.

Strictly, this wasn’t a WordPress issue, more of a left-field issue associated with upgrading the FeedBurner plugin. However, the lack of support by WordPress for older plugins is the only reason I upgraded – triggering the loss of my RSS feed.

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I was delighted to see Jeff Nolan has started to work for NewsGator.

Jeff, who has previously worked for Teqlo and SAP was one of the best speakers we had at the it@cork annual conference last year.

NewsGator, the company he is joining, are the leading RSS client company, powering FeedDemon and NetNewsWire as well as NewsGator. I have used and evangelised NetNewsWire (RSS Reader for Mac) for years until my recent conversion to Google Reader.

To paraphrase Jackie:
Jeff, well done on finding an interesting company to work for. As someone who hasn’t found that yet (hence the continued consultant status), I can imagine how much that means to you.

Delighted for you.

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This is a great video explaining the reason why RSS is so powerful in non-tech speak!

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Google has done a significant upgrade of the mobile version of Google Reader, as well as the desktop version. I haven’t seen this written up anywhere yet (apologies if you wrote it up and I missed your post).

Look at the bottom of the screenshot above. There are new links for Tags, Subscriptions, Settings, Sign Out, More Google Products and Google Labs.

This is fantastic – previously Google Reader’s functionality on mobile devices was limited to viewing the 10 most recent posts in your feed.

Now you can change the number of posts displayed (5, 10, or 20) in the Settings, view your posts by Tag, view your Starred and Shared items (in the Tags page) and log into your other Google applications.

This has to be the strongest indication yet that the heavily rumoured gPhone is imminent. There is a bit of work to do on it – moving from the Google Reader to Google Calendar requires you to re-enter your Google account info, for example. This should be maintained across Google apps obviously. Other than that it seems to work flawlessy though.

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Overnight Google added search functionality to Google Reader.

What is amazing is that it took so long for an ostensibly search-related company to add this to the Reader.

Having said that, the search functionality rolled out is extensive allowing searching of individual feeds, all feeds, or by folder lavel.

If you don’t see this functionality in your reader account, try logging out and logging back in again.

Another bit of previously available functionality I missed is the ability to collapse the left-hand sidebar with just the keyclick u (as in the image above) and the ability to call up a list of keyboard shortcuts just by clicking ?

Google Reader is getting better and better. It is now my main reader and has helped me enormously in being more efficient in my feed reading. Google Reader’s only serious competition, Bloglines needs to do something drastic or it will lose out completely to Google.

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