Tweaks and Geeks

Something I learned today. The old (ancient) method of letting people subscribe to your blog on WordPress Reader has been killed entirely by the Jetpack team. It was unsupported, but still worked as recently as a year ago. I tried to make it a simple process of subscribing to my RSS feed at ravensweald.art (which is attempting to remove the social elements from that blog), but that workaround no longer works around.

So, I modified the site to include instructions on how you can add the story feeds to Reader manually. I wish they would not make it a multistep process, but alas, I’m not sure they really want you to follow a site operating outside of the WordPress.com/Jetpack ecosystem — which is a little silly when you think about it, if my suspicions are true.

If you have been enjoying Vengeance, My Heart, please consider following the steps outlined on this page to add it to your feed.

Failing that, consider bookmarking the site in your browser and swinging by a couple times a week: currently M/W/F — I may take a break this Friday to polish Episode 6.1 over the weekend. The episode is mostly ready, but I think I want to make another pass at edits before publishing.

Hope y’all are doing swell. Let me know if you encounter any issues with my instructions.


14 responses to “Tweaks and Geeks”

  1. lyndhurstlaura Avatar

    Nobody I know who isn’t on WordPress has been able to subscribe to my blog here, as far as I know; plus some of my fellow WordPress bloggers have been somehow unsubscribed from my site recently, and vice-versa. I’ve never had these issues with other, free, social media platforms, but given that I pay for this one I do expect it to behave better. 🙁

    1. michael raven Avatar

      They should be able to subscribe via email or if they use a feed reader (Feedburner, inoReader).

      For WordPress accounts, if you have problems you should be able to leverage assistance from the WordPress team. That’s part of what you’re paying for is the support. I’d file a support request if there are site based issues. They certainly have jumped in quickly when I was hosted at WordPress in the past.

      1. lyndhurstlaura Avatar

        I’ll give it a go, thanks Michael. I think I’ve become conditioned to not asking for help due to the unhelpfulness of the free sites! 😊

        1. michael raven Avatar

          They have pretty good customer service for paid accounts.

  2. Jennifer Neal Avatar

    oh jeez, I was wondering about this. so complicated…ugh

    1. michael raven Avatar

      It’s not that hard, but jeez, they don’t make it as easy as they might. For the foreseeable future I’ll link to the stories here for folks who are overwhelmed or can’t be arsed to.

      It really should be: “Click here to add a feed!” instead of burying in menu hell.

      1. Jennifer Neal Avatar

        I subscribed, but how do I get email alerts? If you know, please share. I can’t find an option to do that.

        1. michael raven Avatar

          Oh I don’t currently have anything set up for email alerts. If there is a demand, I can get that set up. Being privacy focused, I didn’t want folks data in a database.

          I’ll look into options in case that’s the way people want to go.

          1. Jennifer Neal Avatar

            Ahh, ok. No big deal. If you decide to enable that, let me know.

            1. michael raven Avatar

              For you? A third party solution! 😘

              Look down in the footer and subscribe by email delivered ASAP, Weekly, Daily…

            2. michael raven Avatar

              Let me know how it works in practice or if it spams. I have it being sent to one of my email accounts, so I should catch it. But it’s always good to have another eyeball on it.

              1. Jennifer Neal Avatar

                Sure thing. I just signed up so I’ll see where the alerts end up. Thanks!

                1. michael raven Avatar

                  Anytime. There is an intermediate screen to click through to the site. Placeholder for stats on their end and the optional monetization on my own. I don’t do ads, so it should be blank.

            3. michael raven Avatar

              Actually, I decided the footer looked too cluttered and posted an email option on the “how to subscribe” page: https://ravensweald.art/subscribe/

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