Phil Bradley's Blog

Now here's a puzzle, and I'd be very interested in your feedback and thoughts on this. My very first weblog, imaginatively entitled Phil Bradley's Blog was first written in February 2003, so I'm coming up to 5 years of blogging. Which is interesting, but not the point of this posting. I stopped writing it in December 2005. According to Bloglines it still has over 200 subscribers! Annoyingly, that's more than Bloglines reckons that I have for this one. (And that's ok, cos that's not an accurate figure).

How lackadaisical can people be?  Or have they just abandoned Bloglines? Or don't they ever check their feeds? And, if they were interested enough to subscribe in the first place, why weren't they interested enough to move across to the new version? (Before you ask, I did SIX posts to tell people it was happening, so it's not like they didn't know about it.)

Should it in fact matter? Actually, it probably shouldn't, and I should be fussing about more important things, but curiosity is a terrible  Mistress, and I wanna know!  More importantly, short of  contacting as many of them by hand as I could (and I'm not that bothered!)  does anyone have any good suggestions of getting these folks across from the old to the new?

Comments

[Alan F]

Hi Phil,

I am one of those who has your old blog in my bloglines account.

Simple reason - I have ten of the entries marked as 'keep new'. These are things I might want to look at again in future or never got round to reading but was interested in at the time.

An example - I have www.beedogs.com marked - I can't really access it at work but am yet to get round to viewing it at home.

I reckon your other reasons probably account for a few people!

[Dymphie]

Hi Phil,
Perhaps they have subscribed to your 'new' blog already, but keep the old feed running just in case ... :-)

BTW: My Bloglines tells me that this (your new)weblog has 510 subscribers.
And you also have >200 subscribers in Google reader. (Could be the same ones though)

[Hazel]

Have the 200 subscribers migrated to the new blog but not unsubscribed from the old one?
If one reads feeds through a reader then it's quite easy, it seems to me, to ignore the fact that XYZ has not posted for a long time (OK, 2 years is excessive but ...).

[Karen Blakeman]

Hi Phil,

I have had exactly the same problem since I transferred my blog from Blogger to Wordpress. Both were/are hosted on my own site and I still see hits on the old feeds - now reported as 404s since I deleted them.

I can understand why some people may want to keep your old blog 'live' in their reader. I recall that you did not transfer over your existing blog to the new one, so some people may still want to have a record in their Bloglines of the stuff in your old blog (be flattered!). I have to confess that I still have your old blog in my list of feeds but I have an offline reader installed on my laptop. That allows me to set the properties for updates to 'none' and to keep the postings in my local database indefinitely in case you decide to zap the blog.

I fear, though, that the majority may have abandoned their Bloglines accounts and not deleted them, or have so many feeds that they have not noticed that your old feed is deceased.

[David Bradley]

Don't sweat it. Pipe the posts from your current blog to the old version of the blog. Or, better still, if possible do a redirect (301, permanent) from the old feed to the new one. If that's not possible, burn the old blog's feed at Feedburner and adjust the old blog to point to that feed, then update the feedburner settings so that's it's pointing to your new feed. Some users will see you twice, but you will also suddenly catch the attention of old users who wondered where you went, even if there are only a couple of hundred of them!

db

[Maggie]

I am new to blogs and have only recently set up an account with bloglines. Sorry if this is me being a newbie but I wouldn't know for sure how to unsubscribe to a blog without researching it. Could this potentially be a reason for some people not unsubscribing? The other thing is, is it one of those 'housekeeping' type tasks that doesn't make much of a difference if you do it or not?

[Neil Infield]

Having also 'moved' from WordPad to TypePad I found it really frustrating that I couldn't either move my old content or easily created a redirect. Consequently, for fear of losing readers, I am currently duplicating my content on both, which is a pain in the neck.
My theory is that in general people add new subscriptions but can't be bothered to remove old ones.