RSS subscribers – please switch

As many of you may already know, Google has decided that they are going to retire Google Reader on July 1, 2013. I am VERY upset about this. It’s been one of my core services since 2007. Something I use daily like email. It has helped me keep up with over 500 websites in a manner that is much simpler than visiting each and every one of them to try and figure out what’s new and what’s not. That said, I suspect that Feedburner will be on the chopping block sooner rather than later.

For those of you who are subscribed via rss (either using Google Reader or another service.) Could you please update your subscription to:

http://clothingcult.com/feed/rss/

If you are one of the 4 subscribers who appear to getting this via email, I’m sorry but I don’t have a replacement for that option at this time. Let me know if you desperately want this and I will see if I can make it happen asap.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you can ignore this post! 🙂
If you are curious why I was using feedburner in the first place:

Years and years ago the best way to handle rss was via feedburner because formatting was tricky and not completely standardized. Feedburner did a good job of correcting minor mistakes and adding in correct code. Years later, google bought feedburner and all was still good and they even added in some features. However since they came out with Google+, Google seems to have gotten it into their heads that rss is dead even though it isn’t (it’s just not as fast growing as it once was.) In September Google removed adsense integration from feedburner and people started to worry that Google is secretly planning on killing feedburner. WordPress has come a long way since then and I have to say, although I like some of the feedburner features, I don’t want to be left high and dry. SO I’m going ahead and switching things back to the WordPress rss feed.

Since I did the initial switcheroo back in 2002 or so, I did not use htaccess to simply redirect to the feedburner link. This means you will need to make this update manually in your rss reader to continue to be subscribed.

If you are looking for another RSS Reader to replace Google Reader:

I’m most likely going to switch to Feedly. If you only read fashion blogs or other picture dense topics, it’s not my cup of tea, but I know many people who love BlogLovin and they also have instructions on moving your feeds: http://blog.bloglovin.com/2013/03/moving-from-google-reader-to-bloglovin/

There are also dozens of articles at this point listing tons of options and alternatives for people to try out, some better than others. None a precise match to Google Reader (though supposedly Digg is working on one.)

I want to publicly say:

Google, you lost some of my trust with this decision to retire a product thousands upon thousands of people were using as a core service. You even said yourself that Google Reader has a loyally following. And it’s a following of many, not just a few. So many that Reader out-trended the Pope on both G+ and Twitter the day it was announced. So many users that it took down many of the competition’s websites when people started frantically looking at their alternatives. I’ve even seen some Google employees mention that they are upset with this decision.

I want to thank the Google Reader team that brought us this wonderful product – a product so good that year later people are still using it and angry that it’s being taken away from them. I know that most of the orignal team no longer works for Google. I also want to thank any Google Reader project manager who has fought to keep Google Reader around because apparently Google has wanted to pull that team off to work on other projects for YEARS.

If you still think we have a shot at keeping Google Reader alive, please go sign the petition here:
https://www.change.org/petitions/google-keep-google-reader-running

At the time of this post it has over 100,000 signers.

With no peep from Google since the web exploded with the news of Google Reader’s demise, my hopes are not high but I my e-signature is there just in case it does make a difference… Google, your informal corporate moto of “Don’t be evil” isn’t ringing true for me at this moment in time.

And with that, we’ll go back to our regularly scheduled program. Back to fashion, clothes, makeup and skincare.

Don’t worry, I will NOT be turning this into a tech blog!!!  This blog has the widest audience and largest subscriber base of all the blogs I run so I thought it was appropriate to post it here. (And sorry for all of this negativity associated with this!)