How I lost more than 50+ RSS Subscribers - and How You Can Too!
Oh yes I did! But I need to tell you that it wasn’t exactly the readers i lost, but rather the count of the readers. At that time the blog had 340ish feed subscribers and was barely moving. Seemed like people were not subscribing to ROCKFUSE at all.
Not to mention, being the staticaholic I am, I was really frustrated and was asking anyone and everyone whether there was a fundamental flaw in my blog’s design. And nope! There was nothing wrong with the blog design - which frustrated me even more.
And that was the moment I realized, that I had disabled the “FeedSmith Plugin for Wordpress” by Feedburner for some weird reason. I never really took any notice of this plugin and it had been on this blog for more than a year, ever since I started the blog. I only installed it because FeedBurner asked me to do so. And I was never enlightened never knew about it’s true use.
Well, for those of you who do not know the feat it performs, FeedSmith Plugin redirects all your blog’s feed addresses to your FeedBurner Feed. Confused?
Let me put it this way. Your WordPress blog’s feed can be accessed in many different ways. Like.,
- http://www.yourblog.com/feed
- http://www.yourblog.com/feed/rss2
- http://www.yourblog.com/feed/atom
And on ROCKFUSE, I’ve used the address http://www.rockfuse.com/feed a couple of times, to direct visitors to my feed.
When FeedSmith was there, it redirected this address to http://feeds.feedburner.com/mindbloggertips and that subscriber was tracked by FeedBurner. Without it, the plain old WordPress feed was presented which had no interaction with the FeedBurner feed.
Now, this is where it really hits the nail on your head. When someone subscribes to your feed via feedburner address, you get a +1 in your feed count. If that person subscribes to your WordPress feed, then there’s no way FeedBurner can track that subscription. In other words, you lose your valuable Feed Count.
And adding to the misery, that person continues to read your blog through the feed, but will never be tracked by FeedBurner, and never will contribute positively for your feed count. According to my growth stats, more than 50 readers should have escaped my radar within the timeline FeedSmith was disfunctional. And that’s just sad!
So, I just wanted to warn you guys that, if you’re using FeedBurner’s feed count on yur blog, do not forget our dear FeedSmitty!
Technorati Tags: feedburner, feedsmith, rss subscribers, address, rss, feed count
Oh..false alarm..seems like I’ve already had it activated on my blog
Yours maybe get deactivated when upgrading your WordPress (especially if you were using the Automatic WordPress plug-in upgrade, it had some bugs of not be able to activate some plug-ins during an upgrade)
Yeah.. Guess so.. Though I don’t use the Automatic Updater Plugin..
I’ve lost the count of ALL my subscribers, because my Feedburner feed suddenly stopped working. I searched for a solution, posted in the Feedburner Help Group (they closed their forum), and tried to email them, but the email bounced and I got no reply in the Help Group (even though I was not the only one with this problem). There is no way to contact them. I wish there was another way of tracking subscribers, because you can’t rely on Feedburner.
Really? I’m sorry about this. But you always can make a post asking the readers to subscribe to the new feed address?
just checked mine to see whether it is activated. And thank god it is…
Wow, never knew about this plug-in. Great news
Looks like I’ll start converting my normal feedreaders to more trackable readers.
I’ll be careful not to disable it once I activate it
Thats a must have to redirect your feed. You never really LOST anyone though :-p
The point should be noted, we must take care of this fact.
[...] got FeedSmith and transferred my RSS feeds to FeedBurner after reading an article at Rockfuse about messing up your RSS feeds . I did this so that I could track my feed subscribers better. I [...]
I lost mine as well I was wanting to put the feedburner to my new blogs and when I see the subsriber its all ZERO!!