My apologies to everyone who received a bunch of blog notifications from me earlier today.

My blog notification service, which sends a short notification email every time a new blog post is made, is automated by means of AWeber’s Blog Broadcast feature. AWeber monitors the RSS feed from my blog, and whenever it detects a new post, it sends out a short message with a link to the new post.

The RSS feed from my blog is handled by FeedBurner, which offers some advantages over a ‘raw’ RSS feed.

Google acquired FeedBurner some time ago, and since the beginning of this year has been encouraging FeedBurner users to switch their account to a Google account – by the end of February.

I logged into my FeedBurner account today, and without thinking it through, clicked on the ‘Move My Account’ button.

Now…. AWeber do have a warning on their website,
“Be careful not to make any changes in FeedBurner that cause them to republish your feed, or to change the URLs for your posts, as this could cause Blog Broadcaster to think those posts are new, and need to be emailed!”

And what’s worse… I’ve made this kind of mistake before.

What I SHOULD have done is to log in to my AWeber account and disabled blog broadcasts BEFORE transferring my FeedBurner account.

So… what have we learned from this experience?

Technology is far from perfect, and human beings are even less so.

Automated systems like this work perfectly 99% of the time. It’s very easy to get complacent and assume that they’ll do the ‘right’ thing – but ultimately, they do what you tell them to do, and not always what you WANT them to do.

My apologies again if your inbox got flooded with notifications – I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again!

My Apologies If I Ruined Your Day is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

I had to go out for three hours, but in that time my previous post reached position 8 on the first page of Google. You’ll also see a link to the same post from Digg.com, listed at #2.

There’s no guarantee that the post will stay on the front page, but there’s also no reason why it shouldn’t.

And there’s no reason why that shouldn’t work in just about any market.

Johannesburg Hardware report back is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za