Sorry for this bit of administrivia — apparently, Feedburner, which I have been using for years to serve email subscriptions, is ceasing the email service in a couple of weeks. My first instinct was to just trash the service altogether, but I was pleasantly surprised to see I had a not-small number of email subscribers. So, instead of just trashing the feature I’m attempting to do a graceful migration.

Unfortunately, I’m not well-qualified to configure an email plugin for WordPress — social media is about fifty abstraction layers above my comfort zone of solder and assembly language. It doesn’t help that if you try to Google “email subscription plugin WordPress” you are assaulted by a long list of low-quality but highly SEO-optimized and/or promoted suggestions, many of which seem downright sketchy. So, based on nothing more than the number of installs and the appearance of an active maintainer/developer, I picked the Icegram plugin to try and manage email subscriptions from here forward.

I’m hoping existing subscribers barely notice any change, and of course, feel free to unsubscribe if you find anything annoying — the last thing I want to do is to spam anyone.

But, it seems email plugins have gotten far too crafty about by far too many things. If anyone has any advice on how I could handle this transition better or if anyone notices this plugin doing something strange or privacy-invasive, drop a comment here and I’ll try to figure things out. I’m not going to learn PHP and CSS to fix cosmetic annoyances like the improperly sized email sign-up field on Firefox…but I’d rather trash email updates altogether than invade a not-small number of people’s privacy.

Running a blog was so much simpler twenty years ago…

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 26th, 2021 at 12:09 am and is filed under Administrative. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.