Comment Cleanup

Who's the dick writing comments on my blog? by Scott BealeIt was overdue really.  Over 7 years on this blog and I hadn’t done a thorough review and cleanup of my comment section ever.

There were nearly 4,000 comments and, unfortunately, a very large chunk of them were duplicates and a more than I want to admit were some kind of spam comments.  The duplicates undoubtedly came from the time that I imported my comments into Disqus and then exported them back out to my blog to stand alone. I should have caught the duplicates then, but I must not have been paying attention.

The spam comments are a frustration.  They weren’t rampant, but there were a lot more than I thought there were.  Some were the passive kind of spam where they didn’t leave a link in the comment, but the name and URL they used to “log in” were certainly links to follow.  Luckily, only a handful were “lightly” inappropriate, counting them on one hand easily.

In the end, it turns out that there are just under 2,000 comments left, but they are at least valuable conversations that I had regarding posts with a number of readers and a good many friends online.  These I will treasure.

Photo credit: Scott Beale

Happiness Under Construction

I don’t know if anyone’s been wondering yet, but I thought I’d let you know that my “Happiness” series of posts is being moved to it’s own location.  I’ve still got a bit of work to separate out the 300+ posts into it’s own database, so I’m not posting more to it at the moment.  I hope to change that in the next week, and have Happiness as a tab or sub-site of by blog here at rickmahn.com.

Please feel free to let me know of what you’d like to see as I work on improving these posts.  More often? More types of media? Less frequent?  I’d love to learn what you’d like to see in the future for Happiness.

Kind Regards,

Rick Mahn

FeedBurner-Google Migration Complete

This was a frustrating experience, but in the end worked out like it should.  I have to admit that the actual migration by FeedBurner to using my Google account went well, and the existing feeds redirected to the new FeedBurner/Google domain that handles them.

The biggest issues for me were the longer-than-expected reader-count anomaly, and the not-so-exact steps involved to redirect the “MyBrand” URLs to the new feed domain.

Finally, nearly a week after move the feeds over, the reader count is approaching where it used to be.  One or two days eh? HA!

Also, it took a bit of digging to find out the real trick to re-enabling the “MyBrand” configuration for my FeedBurner account.  It after getting DNS changes made, and validating the FeedBurner MyBrand configuration, it turns out that you should also disable the service, then re-enable it.  What’s with that?

Anyway, the feeds are finally redirected correctly, both existing ones that folks were using and the links here on the blog.  Sorry for any strange feed behavior in the last week – I totally didn’t expect it to happen.

Moved FeedBurner Feeds

Well, I finally got around to moving my FeedBurner account to my Google account.  Not sure if I did something wrong, or if I just need to wait a few days.  It seems that I can’t see any items in my feed now, as I monitor it in Google Reader.

Has anyone else done this and found the same issue? I know I’ve probably missed something somewhere.  I’ve got the “MyBrand” personal domain settings enabled, and updated the DNS CNAME records for my domain last night as directly by the MyBrand settings page on FeedBurner.

So far, it’s no go, but I wonder if the CNAME is pointing to the right URL.  In the email I got after the FeedBurner –> Google migration was done, it showed a different URL for the feed.  Namely, http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Rickmahncom – which is different than the rickmahn.feedproxy.ghs.google.com that is listed on the MyBrand page.

Suggestions welcome, but I’ll probably be testing different settings this evening.  Sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause.

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