Weird blog-wackiness tech issue #2807. Or something.

Okay, I’m relatively new to the gentle art of blogging-it-up, so technical snags are not out of order, but this one kinda floored me. Actually it was the “how hard it was to find a good answer” part that floored me.

Normally I wouldn’t post about this stuff at all because there are a million blogs-about-blogging which cover technical weirdnesses and what to do about them. But I had this issue and my usual solution (ask the google gods!) wasn’t cutting it.

So just in case you need it.

The issue.

Got the following email from a reader:

“I haven’t been getting my email posts from you because my Inbox was full. Feedburner says I need to ask you to ‘unpause’ my subscription?”

My first reaction was: “How bizarre!”

Of course I was so busy boggling at the concept of a “full inbox” (seriously, people still have full inboxes?) that it took me a minute to be confused about the pausing/unpausing thing.

Now I’m not exactly the most power-user-ey of power users, but I can find stuff. I just don’t enjoy it. That’s because I’m a humanities nerd and not the kind that likes to fix things.

Seriously, searching forum environments has to be the most boring thing ever for me.

But curiosity got the better of the “let your assistant do stuff you hate” rule. So off to mess around with the Feedburner forum.

Mmm, not helpful. So I googled up a storm to see if other people had this happen. They did, but weren’t clear on what to do about it.

Back to the forum to do the Advanced search thing (oooh, advanced) and found the solution.

Anyway, here’s what you do (troubleshooting).

If you subscribe to someone’s blog via email and you stopped getting posts because of a full inbox, send a quick note to the person who writes the blog.

And do them a favor and link to this post so they don’t have to waste energy wading through the forum.

If you publish a blog and someone’s email subscription has been ‘paused’ because their inbox is too full, yes, it’s weird that you should have to be the one to fix this, but baby, that’s how it is.

It turns out it’s your job to resume their subscription yourself. That is, of course, only if someone lets you know they’re not getting your stuff any more and aren’t happy about it.

So: you log into Feedburner and do the following:

Publicize (top tabs) –>
Email subscription (side tabs) –>
Subscription management –>
View subscriber details (bottom of page) –>
Click on the clock-wise arrow thing-ey to reactivate.

That’s it.

Re-activation complete.

(To be said in sultry James Bond girl futuristic robot voice)

And yeah, if you subscribe to blogs and your inbox is full, now is the time to fix that. Raise your fists to the heavens and ask: “Why didn’t you make me get a gmail account like, four years ago?”

When you’re done raging at the cruelty of the world, release those sad regrets and get that gmail account so you can have all your mail forward there. No more full inbox.

Thus ends the tech “advice” portion of this blog. Though I must say I was totally happy that the person who had this problem was distressed enough at missing my blog updates to write to me to let me know (awesome).

Anyway, I need to go do some Dance of Shiva to recharge my brain and clear out the Feedburner residue.

Hey people who care about stuff like this: write about it so I don’t have to!

In the sincere hope that we won’t have to cover stuff like this again so that I can go back to talking about patterns and habits and how to change them,

I remain
Your devoted Servant, etc,
Havi
(and Selma the duck)

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