Archives for January 2009

As the ironic gods of synchronicity would have it, my recent inflammatory post didn’t actually trigger a mass-exodus of subscribers. What really happened was either FeedBurner under-reported my subscriber count or Google had some issues starting January 17th through January 22nd. The entry for “Google Feedfetcher” disappeared from the “Feed Readers and Aggregators” list, which accounted for a significant portion of my subscriber count–almost half of it.

FeedBurner’s description of Google Feedfetcher reads as follows:

Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users subscribe to them in Google Reader or iGoogle. Subscriber counts include Google Reader and the iGoogle. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google’s other search services.

So, I don’t know if Google’s Feedfetcher didn’t poll my feed for those days, or if FeedBurner simply failed to account for them. Either way, my subscriber count appears to be back to normal.

Tags: feeds, FeedBurner, Google, subscribers, analytics

All it took was this unpopular post, and I lost half of my feed subscribers, going from around 180 down to 90 …

The irony is, it was probably the most active post on my blog for quite a long time, gathering a lot of interesting comments from several different people.

I guess the typical blogger would be devastated by losing half his audience in one day, but the sad truth of my blog is that most of my traffic comes from search engine referrals. While it makes me sad to see them go, if it was so easy to unsubscribe after one post, I wonder how much value they were getting out of my blog in the first place.

I guess this is one way to start off blogging in 2009 with a bang, huh?

Tags: meta, blogging, subscribers, fail