RSS Feed and MailChimp

Over the past few months I’ve noticed more and more bloggers abandoning Google’s Feedburner service fearing the inevitable shutdown and lingering service problems. I decided this week to take the plunge myself and leave Feedburner behind. I was never really that interested in the statistics that the Feedburner provided but I know quite a few folks enjoyed the e-mail notifications provided by the service. As of this morning Feedburner says I have 549 subscribers, a number which varies wildly daily between 400-800.

In any event if you stop receiving RSS updates after this post you should re-subscribe to the following URL;

http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com/feed

You can also subscribe to the comments feed, which is often more entertaining and educational than the main RSS feed ;)

http://blog.michaelfmcnamara.com/comments/feed

While I have over 500 posts on this blog there are over 4,000 comments and quite a few posts with more than 50 comments in each.

While the Internet’s elite rely heavily on RSS to help filter and sort their content, I know the vast majority of new visitors have no idea what RSS even does. It’s funny but I just had to look up what RSS stands for, Rich Site Summary. If you are familiar with the shutdown of Google’s Reader then you probably have a good idea of what an RSS feed is. In order to provide the e-mail subscription that so many people have asked for I’ve created an account with MailChimp. You’ll find the subscription form in the sidebar to the right of this post.

Technical Stuff

If you are interested here’s how I plan to execute the migration. I’m going to rely on the RSS features built into WordPress itself so I won’t be going to another service. I’ve download the list of email subscribers from Feedburner and imported them into MailChimp. I’ve setup an RSS campaign at MailChimp that will notify people of new posts via e-mail. I’ve disabled the HTTP redirect that was setup within Nginx for the domain blog.michaelfmcnamara.com. In about 7 days I’ll set the permanent redirection from Feedburner to the URLs listed above by deleting the Feedburner feeds.

Please feel free to let me know if you come across any problems or issues.

Cheers!