Did ya Miss me?

 

It's July first. I suppose that might not matter much to you, other than to remark on how quickly the year is flying past us. If you are, for instance, involved in matters at local governmental agencies in the U.S., on the first day of July, you might breathe a sigh of relief that you and your budgetary allotments are now in a new fiscal year. But for those of us who are either bloggers or appreciate receiving other writers' blogs via our email inbox, July 1 signals a big change for those using blogging services at Google. If you are one of the subscribers to this blog receiving posts at A Family Tapestry via email from FeedBurner, it means you didn't get any notification that this post has gone live.

Did ya miss me?

The change to blogging services at Google via FeedBurner is not recent. We talked on this blog about this upcoming change not long after Google made their initial announcement. In fact, it was a specific comment on the change here by one reader—and fellow blogger—that inspired me to serve as genealogy guinea pig once again, only this time as genealogy blogger guinea pig, for my posts today and tomorrow. I've got some tips I still need to check out.

Of course, for those who have been wise enough to jump on this problem and solve it right away, there have been options. One example was John Reid, whose prescient decision to switch blogging sites entirely—and who wisely ran the two sites, old and new, with plenty of warning, concurrently to ensure all bugs were worked out—yielded him an artfully-done, streamlined new home for his long-running blog. He is currently posting on a WordPress site under the slightly modified title, Anglo-Celtic Connections. Yet, even with his advanced planning, he encountered bumps in the road with his subscription service of choice—he had at first used MailChimp—and had to search out a better option for his requirements.

While seasoned blogger John Reid seems to be satisfied now with MailPoet, a note-to-self for all of us bloggers still on a Google platform: MailPoet is specifically designed for WordPress blogs. And some of us don't yet want to make the switch away from our blogging platform.

While I secretly have secured for A Family Tapestry a toe-hold on a website at WordPress, I'm not ready to make the jump, myself. In the meantime, I've noticed—through my (erstwhile) handy email subscription to his site—that Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has also recently discussed this latest change and how it will impact his blog.

Randy uses Feedly for his own voracious reading habit, and recommends the service to those of us left behind in the wake of the FeedBurner change. Truth is, I thought I had, too, having added it to the clickable buttons on the left column of my own blog—until, that is, I decided yesterday to give it a test drive and clicked on my own blog's Feedly button. All I got was an error message. Guess I must have missed a left turn somewhere around Albuquerque on that one.

And that is where I'll become the genealogy blogger guinea pig tomorrow. I'll try setting up the Feedly system and subscription button on this blog once again. Hopefully, this time it will be a keeper.