Ocean Of Perspectives

Well, this post is going to be a different from what I usually write about. Today, I’m going to talk about a problem with my RSS service, Feedburner, and how I was so busy trying to resolve issues with it that I ran out of time to write a more creative article.

For the most part and up to this point, I haven’t had much problem with Feedburner’s service. At least they were little things that I could cope with. But today, their tracking system seems to be down and I found that there is no way to contact them for any support issues. I went to their forums, but the last post was back in February 2008 and the forums are closed to any more replies and posts. There was a link to go to a group, which I clicked on. Once there, I found other people’s posts for today asking what happened to their feed subscriber counts. Since I was logged into Feedburner, I tried to join in the discussion, but was told I to sign into Google account, which I did. But after signing into my Google account, the page would load for a second, then reload for a second, and kept doing this none stop. After trying several times, I gave up.  I also tried joining the group to see if that got me permission to take part in the discussions and got the same page loading problems I had with signing into my Google account.

Now I can understand how sites can and do have problems from time to time. What I’m having a real problem with is being able to contact, get information regarding an issue and getting help for said issues. Especially, regarding a site that offers services and support to other websites.

I was able to login to my Google mail account and Feedburner’s site without any problem today. The problem seemed to lay with my being able to sign into their forums, which appears to be the only way of notifying Google and Feedburner that people are experiencing problems. There were no posts or threads from Feedburner or Google regarding any problems with the Feedburner site or stats for today, either.

So, I disabled Feedburner from this site and spent a few hours trying to find an alternative feed stat. Not because they had problems today, but because getting information and help from them seems to be impossible. Unfortunately, Feedburner is the one that shows up prominently in searches for feed stat services. I did come across one other that is called Fedafi. Another concern for me is, I don’t want to keep changing my feed address. I can’t help but wonder why Wordpress doesn’t offer stats for the default Wordpress feed instead of people having to go to third parities like Feedburner?

Has anyone had similar problems with Feedburner, and if so, how were you able to use their forums or contact them? Also, has anyone used Fedafi?

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Tags: Miscellaneous //