Subscribe by Email is Going Away. . . For Now

 

When I first set up this site, FeedBurner had a nice subscribe by email option built into the site. I really appreciated it. FeedBurner was by no means perfect, but then again, nothing is.

Google eventually shut down the subscribe by email part of FeedBurner. Like many other bloggers, I searched for a replacement. Like many others, I opted to go with follow.it for this service. Again, this was not a perfect option, but let’s go back to nothing is perfect.

With follow.it, they placed ads in the emails, which were not too obtrusive. I figured I could live with this for now. If I gained more subscribers, I’d either go for a paid version of follow.it to remove the ads or something else.

I always subscribe to my own blog so that way I can monitor things and make sure they work. I also subscribe to a few other bloggers who use the same service.

A few months ago, I noticed that instead of putting my post content in the email, follow.it instead sent a link to click on to read the post. I wasn’t happy with this change, but again, figured I could live with it for now.

Recently, I clicked on a post sent to me. I clicked on the link to read my post, but the content isn’t there. Instead, just a link to my blog. That is not what I signed up for. The other thing I recently noticed is that my own email address was unsubscribed from my subscription list.

Please know that I use a different email address from the one I used to sign up for my follow.it account. So it’s not that I used the same email for both my follow.it account and my subscription to my blog. In case you might think that is why they booted my email from my own list.

At first I thought, well maybe I haven’t looked at my blog email and they decided to kick us non-readers off. I checked my email and saw that I had indeed read those emails when they came in.

I understand I was using the free tier of follow.it to send my subscribers emails of my posts. However, the service I signed up for, compared to what they offer now, are two different things.

In short, I’m not happy with the changes.

I want my readers to have a good experience the whole way around, and this is no longer providing what I was expecting.

Therefore, I have removed the subscribe by email from my site.

I did not have many subscribers to begin with, so it’s not too big of a deal. I will search out another option for a subscribe by email, but it might take some time as I’m trying to focus on getting the next two stories out right now.

If you want to keep up with things, there are a few ways. If you want notified of new releases when they come out, the best way is to click the follow button on my Amazon page. You can also follow me on Goodreads, as they have my blog posts, including when a new release comes out on my author page there.

If you are on Blogger, you can follow me through there. And of course there is the good old RSS feed, which is probably one of the better ways to still follow a blog these days even if it isn’t as popular as it once was.

You can access both the follow through Blogger and the RSS feed from the sidebar by clicking on the three little horizontal lines on the right-hand side of the screen. 

As for my current subscribers, as of now, you still MIGHT get emails when I post something, but I can not guarantee it at the moment. I will not delete any subscribers from the service and will leave the service for current subscribers in place.

I may search out a new subscribe by email service, but I'm not entirely sure about that at the moment. Right now I’m focusing on getting stories written. But if I implement a new service, I will do a post about it.