Are You Using BlogLines? You May Need to Read This Post…
Posted on Sep 21, 2010 | Categories: Collaboration, Enterprise2.0, General Interest, In the News, Innovation, Personal KM, Productivity Tools, Social Enterprise | 1 Comment
Now that my blog is up and running again, after the recent debacle I have described in this other blog post, and that regular blogging, once again, has resumed, I thought it would be a good chance as well to remind folks about an important change that will be happening very soon and which may affect some of you as well: BlogLines will shut down its doors on October 1st. Are you ready for the move? You probably should! Specially, if you are one of the 200+ folks who are subscribed to this blog’s feed. After that date you won’t be able to get updates from it anymore. Time to prepare…
That’s right! According to the statistics coming from Feedburner, it looks like there are a couple of hundred folks out there who are subscribed to http://elsua.net through BlogLines and it may be a good time to prepare the transition into other RSS Feed Readers, if you would want to continue syndicating the content from this blog. My good friend, Jack Vinson, has put together a rather helpful and insightful blog post, where he has shared some of the alternatives that folks may want to consider, whether you would be interested in online or offline feed reading. It’s a good read and I highly recommend it.
You may be wondering what my RSS feed reader recommendation may well be, right? Well, I actually use a combination of several RSS aggregators, since I decided, a long while ago, to load balance the amount of feeds I’m subscribed to, so that it wouldn’t be that overwhelming time and time again. So under Windows (I still have a T400) I am using RSS Owl, which is nicely integrated into my flow with Lotus Notes (You see? *So* much more than just email! hehe).
On my Mac, where I spent most of my days nowadays anyway, I use a variety of them: Opera, Cyndicate and Vienna for my offline feed reading and specially for those RSS feeds behind the firewall. I use Opera and Cyndicate for the immediate daily internal reads and Vienna for the good-to-read-at-some-point, but-not-really-in-a-rush-at-the-moment. Also use Vienna for researching articles published by others that I know I may need to reference at some point in time.
For my external RSS feed reading habits I am currently using NetNewsWire (Offline) and Google Reader (For which I use a couple of user interfaces through iPad apps I have described already on several blog posts). I use the latter as well with two accounts: one with the essential newsfeeds I go through every day, and another one with the general feeds I have been following over the course of the years. Both accounts serve the purpose as well of having an online backup of the feeds, which allows me then to bring them with me wherever I may well go, which is when the iPad becomes indispensable as a powerful content aggregator. Not to mention as well how often I search for relevant content within either account, which I then include as part of my blog posts over here.
So, as you can see, perhaps a little bit too complex, but it works for me. It’s the feed reading habit that I have learned to grow and treasure over the last 8 years, when I subscribed to my first blog and the rest is history. It’s a system that works for me, and don’t expect anyone else to take it up for themselves. However, one thing I have learned throughout the years is to let go with that obsession of wanting to read each and everyone of them all and reach “inbox zero“ on my feed readers day in day out. Well, that’s no longer happening. Somehow, by immersing rather heavily inside my social networks I have learned to trust them over time quite a bit and a good chunk of my feed reading habits is already pre-filtered by them. They keep finding the really good stuff I am interested in, and, most importantly, they keep sharing it across! Probably just as much as I do with them (I would hope). So instead of focusing on striking another “inbox zero”, I just focus on the content that matters to me and the rest I just let it go. Yes, once again, that river of news and the continuous flow of the Social Web…
Ok, hope you may find all of that information useful and helpful, but enough with that diversion, don’t you think? hehe … Like I was saying at the beginning, BlogLines is about to shut down in the next few days and you may need to start looking for another strategy to get your RSS feeds elsewhere, if you are still using it. The one for this blog is over here, so if you would want to move it across to your new RSS feed reader that would be the URL address you would need to use…
Hope to see you on the other side, after BlogLines is there no more!, to keep up with the conversations… Oh, and a good bunch of folks out there are also subscribed to the blog via email with the wonderful service of FeedBlitz. That is, indeed, another option; remember email going back to its roots? A messaging and notification system of sorts? Exactly! So here you have got the URL address you can use to subscribe to the blog through email.
Thanks again for sticking around and hope the transition on October 1st, or sooner!, goes smooth for those of you who are still using BlogLines. Good luck!
Technorati Tags: BlogLines, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, iPad, KM, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, Mac, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Productivity, Productivity Tools, RSS, RSS Feed Readers, RSS Feeds, Social Capital, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Feedburner, Jack Vinson, RSS Owl, Cyndicate, Vienna, NetNewsWire, Google Reader, GReader, Opera, Sunsets, FeedBlitz, Subscription, Aggregators, Productivity Tips, Syndication
elsua.net Is Now Finally Back Up and Running! Welcome Back!
Posted on Sep 21, 2010 | Categories: Metablogging | 5 Comments
I am sure you may have noticed by now, how over the last 47 hours this blog has been unreachable, returning a nasty error indicating it’s been down throughout all of that time. There have been numerous folks out there, who have been wonderful and kind enough to ask around, through other means, what was happening with the blog itself and the reason why it’s been down for so long, and the short answer is that my hosting provider decided to go through a major hardware upgrade over the weekend that just completed earlier on this morning, after those 47 hours I mentioned above. The good news is that http://elsua.net is now back up and running, faster than ever! The bad news is that I am not sure whether I would be recovering from this one outage in a long while!
I have got plenty of mixed feelings at the moment, to be honest. I have been with HostPC Internet Services for over three years now and all along the customer support and the Internet services provided have been outstanding. Till the last couple of days, where they mentioned in the Support Forums, that they would be going through this hardware upgrade over the weekend to make things go even faster. And somehow it’s taken a whole lot more than what I think would be considered a necessary downtime.
The end result is that yes!, things are snappier than ever, with some amazing response times. But at the same time the traffic coming into the blog has almost disappeared! Gone! Vanished! Zipped! Nada! Nothing! Into thin air and probably won’t be returning back any time soon! Guess this is just what happens when your blog goes down for more than two days without any prior warning and, in this case, it is just really bad timing after the recent massive increase of blog traffic thanks to the Mashable & TWiT net@night effects.
All of that effort, all of that traffic, is now gone after my hosting provider decided to go through a hardware upgrade without telling its users it was going to happen; no notifications being sent out to prepare our audiences for the downtime; no notifications alerting us when the system would be back up to keep us all informed; no notifications shared across as to what would be the potential repercussions of such upgrade. Instead, we get to suffer from them right away! And hope for the best! Ouch!!
And that’s where the mixed feelings start kicking in once again. Right now, after that customer experience, and facing that huge sudden drop in blog traffic (From the several hundreds of visits to just a few dozen at the moment!), due to the site being unreachable, I feel like I need to find another hosting provider, more than anything else to show them how you need to treat your customers with a little bit more of respect, at least, how you need to prepare better for such downtimes, so that those very same customers can help their own “customers” prepare for that unavailability of their Web sites. But then again I don’t want to throw away overboard the wonderful support and customer service I have been having over the last three years till this past weekend. What to do? What to do?
A good friend of mine told me once, a few years back, when I was first starting to blog, both internally and externally, to actually avoid blogging whenever you would be upset or angry about something, because in most cases you very rarely know what is going to come along after that. The backlash. He also told me how it’s a good thing not to take any harsh decisions when you are upset, because you have a tendency to lose your focus, specially, when those decisions may have, or involve, a long term impact. So I think I’m going to cut them some slack for now and stick around with HostPC Internet Services for a little bit longer…
For how long, you may be wondering, right? Well, that pretty much depends on you, my dear readers of this blog. I am going to let it rest for a couple of days and see if blog traffic resumes to the healthy level it once was (A couple of days back!); that way it would give me a chance to chill out, cool things off a bit, think about it carefully and if within two or three days things haven’t picked up again, then I think it would be a good time for me to start looking for another hosting provider. Something like a new, fresh start, except that, this time around, somehow, it would feel that I have left behind a huge part of me: you, my faithful readers, who have kept coming back for more over the years.
Somehow, I strongly feel that things will never be the same anymore, after having experienced this 47 hour long outage. But we will have to wait and see whether you folks will be coming back and stick around or whether you may have moved elsewhere. You know, the Internet, sometimes, does these things to you. Fingers crossed things will go back to normal and to what they used to be before. For now regular blogging at http://elsua.net will resume from here onwards…
My sincere apologies to all of you folks out there, who may be reading this blog entry, for this unexpected and unprecedented downtime. Hope you will be forgiving the sudden and abrupt interruption of service and please do come back soon! We miss you…
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Communication, Enterprise 2.0, Metablogging, Perceived Risks, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0, Weblogging, elsua, HostPC Internet Services, Hosting Providers, Downtime, Customer Service, Customer Support, Outages, Recovery
