RSS Feed and Email Subscription Changes
The other day I asked for feedback on the issue of full or partial feeds. There wasn’t much feedback and what little I got was pretty evenly split. So I’m running an experiment and instituting a full feed to see what if any difference it makes. Who knows, maybe I’ll get more readers.
As part of that I’ve moved the feed to a FeedBurner feed. You don’t need to update your links though as I’ve set an automatic re-direct to take care of things for you. Feedburner adds some additional useful links to each entry so you can email entries to other people or bookmark an entry on del.icio.us if you use it. The main advantage to me however is that it will give me a single stats point so I can get a better feel for how many people are actually reading this feed.
A related change is that I’ve moved all the email subscriptions from Bloglet to FeedBlitz. The FeedBlitz email is a bit nicer in its design and the features it offers for people. I’ve done this for all existing subscribers so there’s no need for you to do anything. FeedBlitz offers me a better way of tracking subscribers and if they are having email problems and their directory increases the visibility of the newsletter which may attract some new readers.
Eoghann Irving is amongst other things the creator and Editor of Solar Flare. He has a life long interest in all forms of science fiction and fantasy and a pressing need to share this interest with anyone who will listen. Find out more at his personal website eoghann.com..
9 Comments, Comment or Ping
James
I’ve been using FeedBurner for a while and I’m very happy with it. With that plus Google Analytics I reckon I get a quite decent picture of my traffic.
Feb 8th, 2006
James
Oh, and thanks for the full feeds!
Feb 8th, 2006
Yaron
Thanks, full feeds are better.
And that feedback request post may have shown more feedback comments if your comment filtering wasn’t so incredibly and overwhelmingly aggressive.
Feb 8th, 2006
Eoghann
Unfortunately it has to be that aggressive. Today I got 35 instances of comment spam. Thats a good day, it’s been as high as 100 before. I simply don’t have the time to check through the blog multiple times a day to weed that sort of stuff out.
Feb 8th, 2006
Yaron
CAPTCHAs? Actually, even something much simpler is usually very effective, at least so far. Another input box with instructions like “how much is 2+3?”, “What’s the first letter of this blog’s name?”, “please write ‘real’ here”, and such.
Comment spam is a huge problem, but if you lose real comments by real people over it…
Feb 9th, 2006
Eoghann
I will absolutely never use captcha’s or anything similar on this site. I cannot stand those systems.
I shouldn’t actually lose any comments as everything flagged as spam still gets stored, but it has to be reviewed by me so it can sit for a while before I have time to work through them all.
And generally speaking once you’ve had one comment approved by me you’ll rarely have any further trouble with the anti-spam measures.
Feb 9th, 2006
Yaron
I hate CAPTCHAs myself because they’re often not exactly human readable, and require too much work. But a text line saying “type ‘x’ here:”, is a different matter, I think. It requires very little effort from the commenter. And so far these things are not yet so popular, or so uniform, to be automated. So as long as nobody targets your site specifically, it can get similar results but save you the effort of manual filtering.
On a slightly different direction, it’s good to know that you do keep the comments to go over, instead of discarding them. In this case, can I suggest writing that on the page after a comment was processed, though? My reply here started after two attempts to answer the original question failed, and the page looked like some unspecified error page. Nothing about the comment being blocked (though that’s what I assumed), and certainly nothing about waiting until it will be manually approved or not.
In any case this is starting to get somewhat off-topic, so let me just say again that I like the full feeds, and that I hope it will work for you and you won’t feel the need to cut them again.
Feb 12th, 2006
Eoghann
Actually from what you describe I think you may have got hit by a bug that occurred when I upgraded the blog software recently. The comment submission url changed and nothing was getting through for a couple of days until I got a few emails letting me know about the problem.
Feb 12th, 2006
Yaron
That could be it, yes. Certainly fits the behaviour I was seeing. Thanks.
Feb 13th, 2006
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