Melissa's Comeback Post!

I have returned (as some of you might have guessed from our Harry Potter month announcement)! And by this point, I would not be surprised if no one remembers me. While I have written a handful of reviews and posts in the past couple of years, I have been unable to contribute regularly. Now that I have graduated college (woohoo!), I look forward to devoting some of my newfound free time to posting on a regular basis. I figured it was probably a good idea to reintroduce myself before I start posting so that you guys don’t think I’ve kidnapped Lee and sent her to Alaska to fight bears with her . . . bare hands. Bottom line: you’ll be seeing a lot more from me. Oh, and if anyone has any suggestions on what I should read, I would greatly appreciate it. It seems like an eternity since I’ve last read any YA books!

Going Back to Feedburner

Ah, techy blog business. Sometimes you just need to write these types of posts, and this one affects anyone who follows the blog via email. A while back, there was a bit of a scare that Feedburner was going to shut down and take blog email subscriptions with it. Like many other bloggers at the time, I looked into other options and went with FeedBlitz, hoping to head off trouble down the road. Well, Feedburner is still alive and well while I'm paying a monthly fee to FeedBlitz that is pretty nominal but still a fee, whereas Feedburner is free. I'm currently trying to cut out any unnecessary expenses, blog-related or otherwise, and so I'll be switching back to Feedburner in the next few days. Unfortunately, this means that if you currently subscribe to the blog via email and wish to continue to receive new posts that way, you'll have to sign up again. I do apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for understanding the reason behind the change.

We're Now on Bloglovin'!

With Google Reader shutting down on July 1, we've added Bloglovin' as an alternate way to follow us:

I imported the blogs I follow into Bloglovin', which took one click, but I'm still getting used to Bloglovin's interface. I also have to reorganize my folders to the way they were set up in Reader.

The demise of Reader makes me wonder about the future of Google Friend Connect, which is sort of tied to Reader (i. e., following a blog with GFC automatically added the blog to Reader). With Google really promoting Google+ (which I have no idea how to use), I'm thinking that GFC's days may be numbered, too. As the person who handles all of the techie stuff around here, the potential disappearance of GFC is yet another concern on a growing list. Lately Blogger has been throwing a lot of error messages about how it failed to auto-save a post (in fact, the message just popped up while writing THIS post). In February, the blog inexplicably disappeared from Google search results for about two weeks. On average, about a quarter of our traffic comes from search, and I noticed that it had dropped to absolutely nothing. After a ton of online research and learning about Google Webmaster Tools, which I highly recommend checking out along with Google Analytics if you don't already use both, I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I hadn't received any messages about the blog being removed by Google from its search results, and it showed up if you typed in the whole URL. I was at my wits' end and about to try to seek some tech support from Google when, happily, we started turning up in search results again.

So what I'm trying to say is, I'm considering a move to WordPress down the road. It definitely wouldn't be until I had money to spare for things like hosting fees. Starting from scratch is a rather scary prospect, but with so many changes to the way I'm used to blogging happening anyway, I feel like now is the perfect time to start researching a switch to WP.

Email and RSS Subscriptions Update

We now have a permanent home for our email and RSS subscriptions—FeedBlitz. FeedBlitz is not free and charges based on the number of email subscribers you have, but it offers a lot of features, including migration of existing FeedBurner email subscribers, as well as technical support. If you already subscribe to the blog via email, you should start receiving emails from FeedBlitz instead of FeedBurner with this Monday's (October 22) blog post. It is not necessary to resubscribe. Of course, if you no longer wish to subscribe, simply click on the opt-out link in the email. We'd love for you to stay with us, though, and we thank you for your patience throughout this transition!

Important Information for Email and RSS Subscribers

With Feedburner rumored to be shutting down this month, our email and RSS subscriptions are now being delivered via Feedcat. If you are currently an email or RSS subscriber, we'd truly appreciate it if you resubscribed to the blog- we apologize for the inconvenience. You can still subscribe via RSS by clicking on the orange RSS icon under "Find Us" in the sidebar. If you'd like to subscribe by email, hover your mouse over the icon under "Follow by Email" in the sidebar. A pop-up window will appear, and you can enter your email address in the box that's next to the little pencil icon. Here's a screenshot to better explain:

And that's it! Again, we're sorry for the extra work involved. If for some reason there's a problem resubscribing, please let us know. Thank you so much for continuing to follow the blog!