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Zero Feedburner Subscribers: Dangers of Free Services

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Lots of our big clients woke up to a nasty surprise on Friday 21 September: Zero subscribers in Feedburner.

I've never been that great a fan of Feedburner. It's a largely unnecessary external service. But it's free and clients often come to us with Feedburner already implemented. Who are Foliovision to argue with them about a free service which usually works.

Why don't I like external services and especially free services?

  • there's usually no customer support (Feedburner check)
  • there are no service guarantees (Feedburner check)
  • there are no promises for future service (Feedburner check)
  • there is no one to appeal to: managers hide (Feedburner check)
  • usually you are on a URL you don't control (Feedburner check)

I learned the hard way with four services:

Keep reading Zero Feedburner Subscribers: Dangers of Free Services

37Signals, Basecamp URL change and not giving a damn about your customers

Today 37signals dropped our domain http://webwork.clientsection.com. Instead they have replaced it with http://webwork.basecamphq.com.

There is a thread on their forums covering the issue. As one customer writes:

BasecampHQ is a stupid domain for one. What is its relevance to my clients? I am paying for a professional service – not for branding that sounds like a paint ball website.

I totally agree. Apparently this change is coming with additional footer branding and additional branding in the emails.

This is a case of breaking the contract with the original customer: us. We are the ones who bought into their white label extranet solution with attractive anonymous core domains like:

  • grouphub.com
  • clientsection.com
  • projectpath.com
  • seework.com
  • updatelog.com

We pay a handsome yearly fee for the use of the software and the domain. Until recently, it's been $600/year. Now, it's $1200/year. For that fee, we expected 37signals to honour their part of the deal which was to allow us to continue to use the software and environment which we helped them get off the ground.

Keep reading 37Signals, Basecamp URL change and not giving a damn about your customers

SBI (Site Build It) versus WordPress: How to Structure a Website

For years, I’ve been on the Site Build It list. SBI is the creation of the rather annoyingly gushy Ken Evoy who never stops his carnival barker cries about his one-stop-site-creation tool. 

Evoy’s been at it since the bad old days when the internet was a mess and Site Built It! did have the advantage of actually getting a website up in some form – easier than coding html from scratch for the neophyte.

Throughout SBI’s history, Evoy has shrieked about his process and his proprietary tools. On the surface, a clear process and proprietary tools are a good idea. Probably worth the price of admission (or so I thought at the time). The issue with the proprietary tools (which otherwise might be a good deal) is that you can only use them a little bit. Come and play for one hour per week, see you next week. Not exactly inviting brainstorming or creativity.

In contrast, the indepdendent expensive (many of which are free) tools Evoy condemns let you use them as much as you like once you find them.

Keep reading SBI (Site Build It) versus WordPress: How to Structure a Website

Dual Internet Connections: How to Swap ISP’s Smoothly on a Mixed Platform Network

We have occasionally - say about once a month - had small problems with our cable internet (Chello.sk). We've been lucky - the longest we've been down is one and a half hours and most of the time it's less than this.

Even a single day with internet down for a whole day would cost the company three times more in lost productivity than the cost of the second high speed connection for the year.

So we've done what every modern business should do. We now have redundant high speed internet from T-Com.

Which is a good thing as our cable internet is down today. But no big deal, I just swapped the router over to the DSL connection and we were all ready to get back to work. Well, almost.

Keep reading Dual Internet Connections: How to Swap ISP's Smoothly on a Mixed Platform Network

PR Hoarding | Linkocrisy

Some well-known SEOs are advocating using

Keep reading rel=”no-follow” on all outbound links. Aaron Wall has unearthed this gem in Dan Thies’s updated SEO Fast Start (free content flypaper for StomperNet membership which is $800/month):

Add nofollow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link for some reason.

This is the most narrow-minded tripe I’ve ever heard. Google will rank websites higher who don’t link to anyone else? Such a strategy makes a mockery of the whole essence of hypertext and the WWW (world wide web).

This school of thought has its origins with Leslie Rohde from his Optilink/Optispider cult days (circa 2002-2003). The clunky and overpriced Optilink has since been superceded by Brad Callen’s Link Proctor, later renamed SEO Elite. Aaron Wall has some free tools (alas some of them broken now – SEO Elite is more reliably updated) and there are lots of other pay tools out there now which track your backlinks.

What is valuable advice is not hoarding PR, but channeling Page Rank. I mean really – you don’t increase your wealth by putting your money under your mattress. You increase your wealth by reinvesting your money wisely. And the same thing applies to Page Rank on the internet.

PR Hoarding | Linkocrisy

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