Important Note for Those Syndicating the FreeTech4Teachers.com RSS Feed

About a month ago a couple of things changed with FeedBlitz (the service that I use to publish my RSS feed). First, if you have been syndicating my feed (which I encourage) through a widget on my blog or website, you will need to update to this feed address http://feeds.feedblitz.com/freetech4teachers&x=1 unbeknownst to me the old syndication feed stopped working.

Second, if you previously subscribed to the old FeedBurner feed, you may need to re-subcribe here if you haven't been seeing updates lately.

Of course, if you want to subscribe via email you can still do that here.

RSS Subscribers - I Need Your Help

If you have followed this blog in an RSS reader (Feedly is my favorite) and you have not been receiving updates consistently over the last month, I need to ask you to please subscribe again by using this link (http://feeds.feedblitz.com/freetech4teachers).

Here's what happened to necessitate this action:
Last fall I moved the RSS feed for this blog from FeedBurner to FeedBlitz. At the time nothing changed for people who subscribed to the blog through RSS as I simply redirected old subscribers from one platform to another. I thought that would work just fine, I was wrong. Last month Google finally shut-down the architecture behind Google Reader and in so doing anyone, like me, that had imported readers from Google Reader to FeedBlitz lost all of those old readers.

How to subscribe to this blog:
Through RSS at this address http://feeds.feedblitz.com/freetech4teachers
Through email by completing the form here.
For a once per week summary of the best posts, you can subscribe to the PracticalEdTech Newsletter.

To be clear, this change only affected people who subscribed to the blog through an RSS reader and have recently stopped seeing updates. If you have been seeing the updates regularly in your RSS reader and or you subscribe through email, you don't need to subscribe again.

The Benefits of Subscribing to Blogs

Earlier this week I posted an announcement about moving my RSS delivery service from FeedBurner to FeedBlitz. This is probably a good time take a look at the benefits of subscribing to blogs compared to simply bookmarking them and visiting them on a regular basis.

Subscription Options and Their Benefits
Most blogs have at least two methods of subscribing to updates; RSS and email. Subscribing via RSS through a reader app like Feedly or Flipboard will put the latest updates on that app in near real-time. In both of those RSS reader apps you can create categories of feeds from your favorite blogs and read them all in one place. Feedly and Flipboard don't display advertising next to articles while you're reading.

Subscribing via email will send you an email when new content is posted on a blog. In many cases you can read the full blog entry without leaving your email client. The emails from Free Technology for Teachers come out once a day and include all of the posts from the previous 24 hour period. In the emails that come from this blog, advertising has been removed too (there was a small glitch with that earlier this week, but it have been fixed).

Why not just follow a blog through social media?
I know folks who have abandoned RSS and email subscriptions all together in favor of just relying on social media updates. I haven't taken that plunge yet because social media updates move faster than I can keep up.

Options for subscribing to this blog
RSS feed
Email subscription
Twitter (I put personal updates in this as well as ed tech updates)
Google+ (I share everything from blog posts to interesting pictures that I find)

An Important Message for Email Subscribers

If you subscribe to Free Technology for Teachers via email, sometime in the last eight hours you may have received a malware warning when you tried to click through the links in the email. There is not any malware hosted on this site. The message was the result of an error with FeedBlitz, the email delivery service that I use. This is the message that I received from them.

False Alarms and Click Through Issues Aug 1

This morning, shortly before 8am US Eastern, one of our databases became overloaded and, to use a technical term, crapped out.
Our monitoring apps told us of the situation, we quickly jumped on the apparent problem, and we thought we were done … but there was more to the issue than at first appeared.
One of our downstream web servers that handled tracking became horribly overloaded as a consequence of its being unable to reach that specific database. That in turn caused a failsafe in FeedBlitz to kick in, which had the nasty and unintended consequence of putting up a scary malware message.  That’s a design oversight we’ll fix later; right now the message has changed if you’re still getting it.
Right now we’re rerouting traffic to web servers that are OK. Depending on your settings that might take a while to show up. Job #1 is to get the system serving you properly. Then we’ll figure out what caused this cascade of issues and how to prevent them in the future.
Updates will be posted here and on the @FeedBlitz Twitter account.
Update 09:18 – things are looking much better now and click throughs are working properly.