Good-riddance Google

Google has announced that they will be closing Reader to focus on other projects (hey, like that wildly successful G+!), which means that it’s time for you to update your feed to make sure you won’t get left without my particular brand of snark and science in your feed reader. Looking for a new one? I like Feedly.

http://www.border-wars.com/feed

Please confirm that you’re using the above address and if you’re not, go change it right now. I’ll wait.
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Who’s a good blog reader? Yes you are, how’s a biscuit and a belly rub. Oh yes. There goes that leg. Careful, you’ll hurt yourself.

Here’s a funny video of Hitler finding out Google is closing reader as thanks for updating your feed.

The singular statistic that Google Reader offers tells me that 67 of you are already using the new feed through Reader, which should remain with this blog for the long haul, but most of you aren’t!

It says that 37 of you are legacy users from the blogspot days (the last time Google tried to close me down by deleting my blog entirely!) and are using: hxxp://borderwars.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default and 49 are using what at the time seemed a smart move to liberate my feed from Google’s grasp: hxxp://feeds.feedburner.com/BorderWars. Sadly, Google later bought feedburner and with Reader closing and their recent history of shutting down the feedburner API, support, and Feedburner Japan, it’s only a matter of time until that feed goes bust too. It’ll be a miracle if they even keep blogspot open since they appear to be fully divesting themselves of all things RSS.

So for the 86 of you who might lose this blog on a whim, do resubscribe with this address:

http://www.border-wars.com/feed

There are also over 100 of you on my feedburner e-mail list, but if that disappears at least I know who you are to inform you.  Wordpress offers a similar e-mail service which you can now sign up for by entering your e-mail in the box on the right column.  After you do that, you can unsubscribe from the feedburner e-mails from the link at the bottom of each e-mail so you won’t be seeing double.

As long as I’m sharing statistics, here are a few more for posterity’s sake.  This is the blog’s 411th published post, there are 184 posts in draft, and 15 private posts that need to be reworked before publishing again.  There have been 4,969 real comments, 189k spam comments, and 1,105,425 page views so far.  That’s right, a few weeks ago this blog joined the millionaire club!

One of the benefits of switching to Feedly is that it tells you how many people have liked certain posts on Facebook, etc. and it tells me that 150 of you have already liked yesterday’s post on Confusing Hoarders with Breeders.  No Happy Ending for Blind Dane has 850 likes;  Only 2% of Dogs Die in Shelters Yearly has an impressive 2,621 likes;  Who’s Your Double Merle Daddy? has 912;  Something is Rotten in Harlequin Danes has 408;  Parasite Breeders has 1,278; and Westminster Rewards Cruelty has 2,137.

So thanks for feeding, reading, commenting, and sharing my posts on your social media platforms (like that wildly successful G+!).

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