Are You Getting FeedBurned? [other options]
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Tony Morgan published an article about how frustrated he is with feedburner. I feel his pain, as does anyone else using feedburner to track their RSS stats. It’s not reporting about 12% of my readers at the moment.
One problem is that Google, feedburner’s owner, has always produced top-notch products (Gmail, Maps, Docs, Apps, etc.). But, what happens when Google, known for their strong products and, therefore, non-existent customer service, buys a smaller company whose product isn’t flawless, but then tries to impose their own awful customer service standards on it? You get a flawed product with bad customer service. Not a good combination.
Another problem is the monopoly. They don’t really need to improve because they have no competition. The other issue is that we have no alternative. When they screw stuff up, we have to put up with it because we’re stuck. We have no way out.
On top of that, if there were an alternative, we’d have a seriously tough time switching. We’d probably lose a large percentage of subscribers, which is the last thing you want.
There is, however, one alternative, although it’s not nearly as pretty as feedburner. Plus, it requires a self-hosted Wordpress blog with plenty of bandwidth; also not pretty. To check out how it works, go to this guys blog post on the subject.
So, what’s a lowly church blogger like yourself supposed to do?
Well, for most of you, publishing stats isn’t a big deal. Although you like to know how many people are signed up, it’s not the end of the world if feedburner misrepresents the data. Your readers probably don’t know what RSS is anyway.
On the flip side, if it does matter to you, let me know and I’ll see if I can whip something up to take feedburner on. If there’s enough support, I might just go for it. Of course, it would be a slimmed down version. It’d be the stats, an email option, and an ad option. After all, what else do you need?
What do you think?
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Yeah that sounds interesting!
If you do something, ill support you…
Jermayn Parker’s last blog post..How to make an Effective Church website
I’ve noticed more issues with Feedburner recently but I’ll probably just stick it out with them. I’ve already got a bunch of people signed up for email subscriptions (which is what most RSS illiterate people prefer) and it would be a pain to switch it over unless the alternative was really good.
Brad Ruggles
http://www.bradruggles.com
Brad Ruggles’s last blog post..Smoking Cigars
The switching part is tough. It could set your subscriber progress back months.