Friday, April 30, 2021

A Little Housekeeping and Other Distractions

Not THAT kind of housekeeping, although lord knows my place could use it. No, this is about my blog site and a message I got from Blogger recently:

FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner) is going away
You are receiving this information because your blog uses the FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner).
Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be discontinued in July 2021.
After July 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported.

I added this widget quite awhile ago when I realized it was an option. I have a couple of blogs that I follow that I've opted to get notice of new posts or even entire posts via e-mail and had at least one reader that was interested in getting notifications from me that way. But now everyone agrees that Feedburner is dying a slow death and it is time to move on. I don't know if anyone else is using this service to receive my posts but if you are, be forewarned that the e-mails will end in a few months. My recommendation is to sign up for a free blog feed reader like the one I use: The Old Reader. Just pop in the name of the blog you want to follow and like magic, whenever the blogs you have chosen publish a new post, it will show up there. Just one site to go to in order to stay up with all the blogs you follow. Most posts can be read in full right there. A few you may have to follow the link to the post on its blog if the blog owner has it set up that way. And if you wish to post a comment, you just click on the post title and it will take you to it on its blog where you can then comment. Here's a screen shot of what mine looks like when I log in: