Hello, blog readers. Been awhile, I know. If you’ve been with me for some time, you know that my motivation to write comes and goes and I don’t like to blog for its own sake. And no, I’m not about to start now. But be warned that this is a fairly self-involved little post lying ahead of you.

I’m trying to troubleshoot a curious issue. I have that silly little Feedburner button over on my sidebar that tells me how many subscribers I have without having to go to Feedburner. Yes, it tells you that info too, but I’m the primary audience as most of you read this through feeds anyway.

Well, since I implemented the button, the number of subscribers has stayed between 950 and 1,150 subscribers, for the most part. Quite frankly, that’s a lot more people than my content deserves, but I value each and every one of you and whatever content I do provide is motivated by your readership.

So imagine my horror when that number changed unexpectedly to fewer than 200 subscribers. Having not written anything lately, I thought it quite unlikely to have been a result of anything I said. My attention has instead turned to two recent events that may or may not be at the root of it: the LISHost server migration and the migration of Feedburner to Google accounts.

Note that one of the reasons that subscriber number is so high is my successful redirects of old Movable Type feeds, as well as the generic Wordpress feeds, to the Feedburner feed. It’s likely that the number represents some people who’ve subscribed to multiple incarnations of the feed and/or migrated feed readers (e.g., Bloglines to Google Reader) and subscribed in both places. It’s not a thousand unique readers. I’m not delusional. Still, dropping 90% of the total is alarming.

All of the above being a very long-winded way of saying that I’m testing those redirects with this post, expect to find something broken. Thanks for your indulgence and continued readership. With Computers in Libraries coming up next month, I’m sure I’ll be back shortly to let you know what I have going on there.