Did you hear? FeedBurner Subscriptions Bite the Dust

Cue up the music, because Google again does another round of creating dust of your web services.

I got an email from Google letting me know that Feedburner is getting dusty. Well, maybe they are not deleting the service, but taking away from it.

Sure grandpa, who cares? What the heck is Feedburner?

It stems from the days when RSS was a thing, not just something old web fogies lament about. For some, it was a service to make RSS feeds more human readable. I found it also was a good cleanser for feeds that just could not get their way through the Feed WordPress ingestion engine. But I used it most for creating a simple way for people to sign up for email notifications when I posted new things… here on CogDogBlog!

FeedBurner has been a part of Google for almost 14 years, and we’re making several upcoming changes to support the product’s next chapter. Here’s what you can expect to change and what you can do now to ensure you’re prepared.

Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time.

Their non-core feature is most core to me. But what do I matter?

It was simple to find the CSV export of subscribers. The front of the site said it was 63 but I saw 88 emails. That is MASSIVE!

I then installed the Subscribe2 WordPress plugin which manages the same task (I first used this on the H5P Kitchen site, it lets visitors subscribe and unsubscribe to getting email notifications of new posts).

So… if you are one of these subscribers, you should see this post arriving in your inbox (though maybe it might end up flagged as spam as it seems much of the email from my site seems to do). If any of you 88 get this as email, please let me know!

And if you are wanting to join the in-crowd of subscribers, look under that hamburger menu for a brand new sign-up form.

I am not all that upset, this is not much of a deal breaker, and I guess I should congratulate Google for keeping Feedburner going for 14 years (that’s long for Google life). And yes, this is a typical thing you do when you run your own site and do not depend on some corporate overlord to do the work.

Email! It’s still a thing! Tell your pals.

UPDATE 5 MINUTES LATER

Well it works! Sort of. I see from this bounce Terry was subscribed under an old email… Don’t worry Terry, I signed you up!

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