For 2007, I’m trying to improve my own health as well as the health of my blog. To that end, I have been wrestling with my feed to try to slim it down. After several programming frustrations, getting into the intricacies of xml that I never wanted to know, I think I’ve fixed it. If you’ve noticed the feed not working right for you (especially if you use Bloglines) for the past couple of days, I think it should be okay now.
I am putting my feed on a diet, narrowing it down to just the Feedburner feed and taking away the atom and rss options for new subscribers. Don’t worry, the Feedburner SmartFeed will work with any feed reader or application you want to throw at it.
If you are already subscribed to this blog via an atom or rss feed, I would love it if you would upgrade your subscription by just clicking on the orange
feed icon here or in the right sidebar, or if you use Firefox you can click on the orange feed image in the URL box of your browser. This will give you some added features at the bottom of each post, and will help me keep track of how many subscribers I have (because I love each and every one of you). It only takes a second (okay, maybe three).
If you are not yet a subscriber and don’t want to have to bookmark and manually check for new posts, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about with all this feed stuff (especially after talking about putting the blog on a diet), here’s a great introduction to how it works and some recommendations for feed readers you can use (and don’t worry, even though the article talks about RSS, it also applies to Feedburner’s feed as well).
Enough housekeeping. Back to social marketing!
[UPDATE: Fri 1 pm PST: Bloglines is still not showing the corrected feed, and I have an email in to them to fix it. Should be soon.]
[UPDATE: Mon 9 am PST: Thanks to everyone who updated/started your subscriptions. New posts are showing up correctly in Bloglines now, but some older ones are still truncated and out of order. It shouldn’t affect you unless you are looking back at older posts via the feed reader, in which case you should just come directly to the blog.]
Photo Credit: Omnia
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
Good for you Nedra! Although feedflare, widgets, and badges are all useful, it all makes for a graphic designers worst nightmare. Blogs are so cluttered by it all, it reminds me of Ny Times Square. My boyfriend is always trying to get me to add things to my sidebar. I always protest and argue that simplicity and solid, clean design goes a long way.
Thanks, Ashley. My mantra is “simple and elegant.” Your site definitely fits that description.