I find myself writing more on the food blog because I love the QuickPress option of the Dashboard. It’s also vastly easier to navigate quickly from one portion of the tool to another. Speed and ease are king in the content entry world. I hope the same effect occurs on this blog as well. Celebrate.

All right, how long will this take?

The whole process took about 5 minutes. Seriously. It was painless. I clicked the transfer link, it sensed that I was logged into Google, and prompted me to make a decision: merge FeedBurner with the currently logged in account, the Google account linked in my FeedBurner email account setting, or to create a new Google account to merge with. Then, it went grinding away for a minute or two. Finito!

That sounds easy. But seriously, there has to be some drawback.

I don’t see any drawbacks if you already have a Google account. I had a concern that I was going to lose subscribers in the process, because there is a new feed address (http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MyAccountName, where the old one started with http://feeds… – addition of the 2). However, the FAQ assures us that subscribers will not be lost, as Google instantiated a redirect of the old address to the new. And, this redirect supposedly lasts forever.

FeedBurner site visitor stats have been eliminated. However, Google Analytics is far more robust, and likely people with Google accounts already have Google Analytics in place. A reminder to those using FeedBurner site stats that your visitor tracking scripts should now be removed.

Another repercussion: users implementing email subscription forms must update the form code per instructions on the Email Subscriptions page. If you’re just using a link like in my sidebar, that link must also be updated.

Meh, this sounds lame. How do I get out?

If you don’t want to go with the Google/FeedBurner merger, you have until February 28, 2009 to enable a 30-day redirection option. You are to start using your own feed rather than FeedBurner. This option, for the first 15 days, serves as a redirect to your feed, and for the last 15 days shows users an empty feed that “reads ‘This feed is no longer active. A new feed is located at’ followed by the URL of your original feed.”

Okay, it’s not worth all that effort. I’ll just keep FeedBurner. What should I do again?

Well, after you do the transfer, update your feeds to point to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MyAccountName. Remove your FeedBurner site analytics. Add Google analytics if you don’t already have it. Update email subscription forms and links. Pretty easy, right? Five minutes, ten tops.

Lost RSS Subscribers? What up?

This happened to me 3 days ago (January 17), and I just today (January 20) transferred my feeds to Google. The loss of subscribers were all Google Reader/Feedfetcher subscribers. Are the lost subscribers due to the transfer? I doubt it. I bet Google is doing something is in the pipes that is affecting their reporting of Google Reader subscribers. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have noticed the issue until today. Just a thought.

I hope this helps you and eases any trepidation you may have or have had before switching to Google feeds. I wrote this up in answer of some of the questions I had regarding the transfer, and hope you benefit. All of my data was regarding my two blogs, Neatly Sliced and the Yum blog, so mileage may vary on users with many many FeedBurner accounts to transfer.

Make sure you don’t miss a single slice of codey goodness! Subscribe! If subscribing by RSS isn’t your thing, you can subscribe for the new Neatly Sliced email updates using the form below. I tested this on my Yum food blog, and it seems to work quite nicely.

I also promise you, no spam for you from me from subscribing. You can unsubscribe at any time.

On a side note, aside from the unavoidable inline styles and Javascript for the cut and paste snippet form, the code integrity of FeedBurner’s snippet is decent! Form fields are children of block level element buffer between the field and the form tag, all tags are properly closed… I’m quite pleased with you, FeedBurner.

The new 2.5 Dashboard is a lot slicker and web 2.0ish. Lots of Ajax and/or Javascript integration, which is nice. Things are moved around a bit which will get a bit of getting used to.

I’m totally psyched about the improvements to the editor area. I hated how it would mess with HTML code. I will hastily update the food blog, as this was one major reason why I never posted there; every post was a headache to format properly.

Maintenance Mode plug in broke on the update for me – I was logged in yet I kept getting the maintenance mode screen (which ought only to appear when not logged in). I had to delete the poor pansy. Perhaps a new rev is in store.

I have to get around to updating the food blog, although I should focus on posting before upgrading.

I’m not the best cook or baker in the world, so a lot of it will feature comical tales of my cooking attempts.

If you like food, bookmark, subscribe, laugh, and share foody goodness with a cooking newbie.

My NeatlySliced.com email is still having problems, but otherwise everything is working as expected (hopefully!).

With this change in host, I have also made some changes to the blog. She is now upgraded to 2.1.3 (which is still old, but far better than the 2.0.* version I was running). With that, I have installed some plugins that my blog will now support.

From a user interface standpoint, the Archives have moved to their own page and I am utilizing the Clean Archives plugin first engineered by Shawn Grimes but now developed by Sean of Geek With Laptop.

From a Web 2.0 standpoint, you may now subscribe to email notifications of comments on a particular post. I don’t have a high comment frequency on this site, but regardless, you may find it of interest. To accomplish this I implement the Subscribe to Comments plugin.

I also started using FeedBurner for my RSS feed. I was confused regarding FeedBurner before. I had thought that it was automagically creating its own feed. In reality, FeedBurner takes the feed that your blog already generates and processes it all fancylike. For example, with FeedBurner I have added the feature to “Email This”, “Save to del.icio.us”, or “Digg This” right in the RSS feed itself. Additionally, I can derive other statistics regarding the feed. As the user, you receive no significant additional benefit other than the “Email This” and bookmarking links.

One day I will change .htaccess so that the old feed automatically rewrites to the FeedBurner feed, per the instructions in this “Using FeedBurner” WP post. In the meantime, update the feed at your discretion – it makes little difference to me.

If anyone else has been having problems with cache.php on a WordPress installation for no apparent reason, you are not alone!

I mean, seriously. What is the point of malice?