I'm interrupting the normal iPhone J.D. content for a programming note. Although most folks read iPhone J.D. using a web browser, there are also thousands of people who have new posts show up in their email Inbox because, for about a decade, I have used a free email delivery service provided by Google called FeedBurner. However, Google recently announced that it will soon end this service.
And perhaps that was just as well because people would often alert me to problems with FeedBurner subscriptions. Posts would sometimes show up late. The message format was sometimes poor. Any time that I embedded a video (such as at the end of most of my Friday posts), the FeedBurner email would only show a blank area with no way to access the video. And there were other minor issues from time to time.
As a result, I recently started paying for a service called FeedBlitz, and I've been testing it for the last few weeks. While not perfect, it seems to work much better.
What does this mean for you? If you currently subscribe to the old Google FeedBurner feed, very soon I will move the entire subscription list to FeedBlitz. If all goes as planned, you should continue to receive emails as you always have, with no interruptions and nothing extra for you to do, but the emails will look better. You can easily tell which service is being used because the old emails have a square icon at the top and the new emails have a full banner. Here is an example of the old FeedBurner email followed by the new FeedBlitz email:
I know that there are inevitable hiccups with every transition. For example, your email service may notice that the sender "jeff@iphonejd.com" is now coming from someplace else, and that may cause your email service to think that the new emails are spam or phishing. Or there may be something about the way that FeedBlitz formats the emails that doesn't work well with your particular mail client. (I've tested quite a few, including Apple's Mail app, iCloud, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook, but I know that there are many other options.) If you encounter a problem and you think that there is something that I can do on my end to fix it, let me know. Having said that, FeedBlitz is a major provider — you may already receive other FeedBlitz emails — and they seem to know what they are doing.
If this is the last iPhone J.D. email you receive, then there was clearly a problem for you. I recommend that you try to resubscribe using the new sign-up link, located at the top right of the iPhone J.D. website.
Speaking of which, if you do not currently receive new iPhone J.D. posts via email, you might want to try it out. You can subscribe or unsubscribe at any time, and I don't share your email address with anyone else (other than FeedBlitz, and they have a good privacy policy). Receiving new posts via email is a good way to learn when there is a new post, whether you read the post in your email client or click on the header to read the post on the website. Typically, I only post a few times a week, so it is not a lot of additional email traffic in your Inbox. On the other hand, if you are happy with the current way that you read iPhone J.D., then I suppose there is no reason to change what is not broken.
Speaking of subscriptions, I know that I speak for Brett Burney when I say that we both appreciate all of you who have subscribed to the audio version of the In the News podcast and all of you who have become a subscriber to the video version on YouTube. If you haven't done so yet, I encourage you to do so. That way, the new episodes are available to you just as soon as they are released, and you can listen or watch whenever you are ready.
I hope that you enjoy the improved email service via FeedBlitz, and I apologize in advance for any problems that I wasn't able to anticipate despite my best efforts over the last few weeks.
