Generally, feed statistics - the account of how many subscribers a blog has - don't jump around too much. Subscribers don't tend to leave en masse. Over the past few days, I've seen the reported numbers from FeedBurner for this blog drop by 60%. This seems like nonsense to me. In addition, I've been getting quite a few emails and comments telling me that the feed is no longer valid, that it contains 'div' elements and so on (this may have been due to my attempt to embed Gigapan images, though I'm not yet convinced of that).
It looks like FeedBurner may be another casualty of Google's acquisition system. Good luck to Jaiku!
I posted recently on the dangers of free systems. Gerald commented that there are lots of free things out there that are great, such as open source software. Open source software is free like someone giving you the blue prints to a car. FeedBurner is free like someone saying: here, I'll give you free fuel for your car. Then, one day you are driving to work and find out that the fuel is actually not gasoline but orange juice. It's still free, but it doesn't work.
So, FeedBurner - what's up? I'd certainly appreciate some information about any radical changes that may have been implemented in terms of how you count things.
Hi there, FeedBurner is neither dead, wounded, or suffering from mild allergies. There's probably some simple explanation for what you're seeing, like a configuration change in your blog's feed setup or possibly one of the third party aggregators has stopped polling your feed. Make sure you are a) using the FeedBurner integration in Typepad correctly, b) that your feed is valid (login to FeedBurner, go to Troubleshootize and see if FeedMedic says your feed is invalid), c) check your feedburner stats and see if a particular aggregator has stopped showing up that might explain the temporary drop in numbers. We'll separately poke around and see if we find anything rattling around under your feed's hood.
Not only are we not dead, we are working on a ton of integration items now which will hopefully provide lots of new benefits for publishers across the board.
Posted by: dick costolo | October 20, 2007 at 12:21 PM
Ok, two things, if you previously had redirection enabled within Typepad (redirecting your source feed to feedburner so that you see ALL your subscriber statistics), that is not enabled right now, so people subscribing to your original typepad feed will not show up in your FeedBurner stats. More on redirection here:
http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2006/06/your_feedburner_1.php
Secondly, there's been an intermittent problem with Typepad source feeds over the past week or so that causes them to come up looking blank thanks to a malformed character of some sort. Typepad is working on a permanent fix for this, I believe. More on that issue here:
http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=17123
Posted by: dick costolo | October 20, 2007 at 03:16 PM
Dick - thanks for looking in to this. Unfortunately, according to TypePad, my feed is wired up with FeedBurner (I turned this on as soon as the feature was available and have never touched the setting). The only option that TypePad gives me here is to *disconnect* the feed. So it sounds like there is a disconnect somewhere. Either TypePad is incorrect and someone or something has changed a setting without my permission, or your information is incorrect.
Any thoughts on where we can go from here?
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | October 20, 2007 at 07:54 PM
Matthew,
There is something very wrong with your feed when looked at from Google Reader. The entries show up as plain text instead of html, so all content is intermingled with the tags. It started around 2 weeks ago.
Also - still in google reader - your feed has been periodically republished with old entries showing up over and over again. Looking back at it now, it seems that the same entry would show up as broken html (as above) and then a day later as normal, readable entry.
That could cause some people want to unsubscribe. Or it might be a symptom of something else.
If you can't reproduce it yourself, email me and I will make some screenshots of what I see.
Posted by: Alexandre Rafalovitch | October 20, 2007 at 09:55 PM
I don't know, your feed looks fine to me from Google Reader. In fact, over the past few days, I've had the opposite of you... more subscribers than usual.
Posted by: Nathan | October 20, 2007 at 11:08 PM
Really sorry about your FeedBurner dilemma but I dunno... I think I'll diagree on your blueprint analogy. I've downloaded plenty of ready to roll open source stuff. Don't know which open source store you've been giving your patronage... My stuff usually comes with keys in the ignition and fully fueled and getting really fine mileage.
(Thinking Apache, MySQL, Ruby and the like... Server class Mac builds of course)
Posted by: Gerald Buckley | October 30, 2007 at 08:11 AM