Oops almost lost 300 RSS readers in move to Squarespace

On Monday 5:30p, Feb 7, 2011 I made the switch from TypePad to Squarespace.  I had a list of tasks to do.  Here is my initial list.

  1.  
    1. Write one blog entry on TypePad saying in the process of moving.
    2. Set up SquareSpace account.  Move content over. 
    3. Cancel Chartbeat.
    4. Domain switch from typepad to squarespace
    5. Setup Feedburner, Google Analytics, Adsense.
    6. Keep Typepad up and running for a while.

All of this was OK and up and running in less than an hour.  But, the next morning a friend said his RSS reader wasn’t working to my site.  I checked Feedburner to see if the feed was working.  The RSS feed was working, and I thought I fixed the RSS feed redirect.  After another couple of days, I see I had gone from 1,200 RSS subscribers to 900, losing 300 subscribers.

300 users can do a lot as the infamous 300 Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae.  And, because RSS readers are anonymous I had no idea who I lost.

Finally after another couple of days I figured out the ATOM, RSS, and RDF urls I needed to remap using the URL shortcut feature in Squarespace.

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Here are the three changes I made in URL shortcuts for ATOM, RDF, and RSS going from TypePad to Squarespace.  Note the “gdcblog” is custom for my blog.

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After making this last change.  300 subscribers are back.

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My apologies to the RSS readers who have missed the last 5 days of blogs, but I think I have you back getting RSS feeds.