i am not a techie.

and that statement isn’t meant to be in the least dismissive of techies. i wish i were more of a techie. and i’m sure adam mclane, my partner in The Youth Cartel, regularly wishes i wasn’t such a technotard. we would quickly lose count if we tried to tabulate the times i broke one of our websites (more than once when he was traveling!), or cried out for help because i couldn’t figure something out. this little blog would have been long ago shuttered after the infamous ‘nativity post debacle of 2011’ had adam not come to the rescue.

but i am a fairly heavy technology user. nothing all that out of the ordinary: two blogs, a pallet of websites, four facebook pages, two twitter feeds, instagram and dropbox and skype and google+, online platforms for invoicing and customer service and event registration and a few other things, and mobile apps for all of these. and i have regularly followed several dozen blogs thanks to google reader (which was my second app for that purpose, after a previous one went down).

so i’m more than a little annoyed that the sometimes-helpful-sometimes-infuriating-always-narcissistic people of google have chosen to kill off google reader. really. it’s the #1 blog aggregator in the world, used by millions, and they’re euthanizing it — on monday (july 1). add to that, feedburner, the google-owned service i’ve used for a long time to allow people to receive my blog posts via email, has stopped being serviced, and is all but dead. they’re not euthanizing it, but they unplugged it from life support last fall, and it’s wheezing and sputtering and slowly dying (and could break and die at any moment, which would be it, since google has a ‘do not resuscitate’ order in place).

my techno-problems, in order:

1. i don’t understand this stuff. i just want it to work for me.
2. i want to quickly scan all the blogs i follow in one place, not go to all of them.
3. i have almost 1000 people who have followed my blog on google reader, and all of them are about to be dispersed like dandelion seeds on july 1.
4. i have about 350 people who receive my blog posts via email due to feedburner subscriptions, and they’re soon to lose that ability.
5. i don’t understand this stuff. i just want it to work for me.

so, it seems there’s just no way around it: i’m going to lose a crap-ton of readers. bummer. i hope some portion of them will re-engage via some new means (fist shake in a northerly direction toward google headquarters!).

here’s what i’ve found, through some searching (throat clear: by searching on google):

blog reader
i’ve switched to feedly, a free service that seems pretty good (this techcrunch article and this gizmodo article were helpful). and if you are a google reader user, and switch over before the googs euthanize the reader, the import function is one-click easy-peasy.

i’m sure i’ll have a little adjustment period. but it looks like it will suit me just fine. i really like the social media sharing buttons at the bottom of each post in the view i use.

thank you, feedly!

(btw: adam has more details, step-by-step instructions here in his post called Migrate to Feedly Now! but i want it noted that he — the techno-wizard — told me no one uses RSS or a reader anymore until i told him about the techcrunch and gizmodo articles. apparently they have more tech cred than me, since he subsequently made this change and wrote his helpful blog post.)

email subscriptions
the replacement for feedburner (the email subscription thingy) was a harder one for me to figure out. articles i read pointed mostly to paid services. and while i truly love you if you’re one of my email subscribers, i wasn’t jazzed about handing over fifteen bucks a month for that service. i mean: that’s the price of one IMAX 3D movie ticket!

so, after whining to adam in what might have been passive aggressive ways a few times, i finally had a conversation with him where i came right out and said “I need your help!” (because, as i always tell the fantastic youth workers in my coaching programs, “great leaders are willing to ask for help,” and “asking for help counter-intuitively draws people to you rather than repelling them from you.” so, adam should be really drawn to me right now.) of course, he knew exactly what to do. he exported my feedburner stuff, imported it into MailChimp (which we already use for many other purposes), created a nifty little email header for me, and set things up to automatically send out emails a half hour after i post new stuff on my blog.

yup. that would have taken me weeks to figure out. took adam about 45 minutes, i think (that’s the learning here, right? you all need an adam. but you can’t take mine.)

seriously, MailChimp is fantastic, and free for small (low quantity) users. and there’s a robust truck full of help tools. and the amazingly friendly and insightful founder/CEO (ben chestnut) spoke at The Summit last year!

bottom line #1: if you’re one of my whyismarko’s email subscribers, you’ve already been switched over to the new dealio, and should be reading this in a lovely email format with my smirking face at the top.
bottom line #2: if you’d like to start receiving my posts via email, just enter your info over there on the right sidebar area where it says to do so. (by the way, i tend to post about 1 – 3, maxing out at 4, times per week. so it’s not an overwhelming quantity.)

there you have it! “marko’s tech solutions blog” will now follow the trail blazed by the googlebots. i’m calling dr. kevorkian right now (he’s got a direct line at google).