Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Bye, Blogger e-mail subscriptions

Google is messing with making changes to its Feedburner service and will discontinue Blogger e-mail subscriptions in July. Google suggests that Blogger bloggers download their subscription lists to use with a new service — something like Mailchimp, I suppose, though Google offers no suggestions.

I’m going to pass, in part because I cannot imagine formatting blog posts to my satisfaction to send out in the form of daily e-mails. (I am just that persnickety.) But also because I think it’s rude to port e-mail addresses to a new service that nobody ever signed up for.

I’ve deleted the sidebar link for new e-mail subscriptions. Come July, I hope that anyone reading Orange Crate Art via e-mail likes what I’m doing enough to visit here or add an RSS subscription. There’s a link for that still in the sidebar.

comments: 7

brownstudy said...

Sorry Google is putting you through the blender again. I read about this today on the Critical MAS site (https://criticalmas.org/2021/04/newsletter-changes-google-screws-the-bloggers-again/), where he pointed me to a site I'd not heard of: https://killedbygoogle.com. It's a graveyard of all the services developed or purchased and then killed by Google.

I rely on Gmail and Google Calendar, but try to limit my use of any of their other services. I'm still steamed about their killing off Google Reader.

(I assume you have a tool to download or export your blog for when Google pulls the plug on Blogger!)

Michael Leddy said...

Yep, I back up my blog now and then (SiteSucker) and do an export too. Google’s recent redesign of Blogger bodes well, I hope, even if I find some of the changes ill-advised. If the worst happens, I’ll have to do the tedious work of migrating to WordPress.

The disappearance of Google Reader was a great blow to all sorts of online writing. Though it hasn’t disappeared, Google’s Life Photo Archive is more and more difficult to use. Such a great resource, and they’ve made it at least semi-impossible.

Sean Crawford said...

Despising Google, I have done with blogger what so many have done: Done a final post to say I've moved, giving my new URL. And yes, I've moved to... Wordpress... My new blog does NOT have my old blog's Google address. Let it go.

This was back in July. Lovers of statistics may be curious to know that my new blog still does not get as many hits as my old one, which was a weekly essay for ten years, while the continuing hits to my old one may be from robots. Except that I have a few comments from I what I presume are people, all commercial scammers, that I never answer, because that blog is behind me now.

Say, the writer in my gets a kick out of how those last two sentences were long.

Michael Leddy said...

It’s a tough call for me. When I started, Blogger seemed the user-friendly choice. The thought of moving at this point is not appealing. But maybe yet.

brownstudy said...

I host my personal blog on micro.blog, which I find to be nicely lightweight; I typically use MarsEdit to draft and post to the blog, though there are many other ways to post. It does not have as many bells and whistles, but I got overwhelmed by the Wordpress dashboard and all the security tweaks I had to apply. As I remember, it had pretty good import tools. I pay $5/mo and it's well worth it.

Another very lightweight solution is Blot.im, which creates a blog from text files kept in a Dropbox folder. No user interface. What a world!

Michael Leddy said...

Thanks for the suggestions, Mike. Is Oddments on micro.blog?

brownstudy said...

Yes, Oddments is hosted on micro.blog.