I have no clue why this excites me, but overnight I received my first spam comment. I’m going to leave it up just because it’s the first! I guess it could mean that the content is getting indexed faster, which is always good.

What’s not good is Feed Burner. I know I’ve been critical of them in the past for a small jump in subscriber count, but last night my subscriber count was 54 and this morning it’s 32. Mark from 45n5.com responded to my outraged tweet that FB is just as good as guessing, so I assume it’s not really reliable. Which bums me out because I’d really rather have no reporting than inaccurate reporting. Oh well, just another thing to learn along the way.

I’m mostly worried that the switch from blogger to wordpress and the domain change has affected the subscribers, but I followed all the steps outlined by Feed Burner. And I subscribe to the feed myself and it looks fine.

As long as I’m pseudo-rambling here and you’re pacifying me by continuing to read, I’ll also mention that I believe I fixed the issue with my video not playing. I switched over to an embedded video from Viddler.com instead of Blip.tv and it seemed to work fine when I tested it. Unfortunately that does mean that the opening screen grab of me with my air quote fingers isn’t there.

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My feed subscriber count went from 33 this morning to 28. Is it possible that 5 people jumped ship today? By all means – but it is suspect since for the last week my count has been bouncing sporadically between the two numbers.

Get your shit together, FeedBurner.

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I read a good article by Scott Jangro on his blog entitled “Voices Carry. Watch the F-bomb!” with some words for the wise on carefully selecting your blog titles when you know you’re a member of these types of link exchange widgets. I was surprised that I was the first to Digg the story. It’s a good read, so I recommend it.

I digress. This particular article perked my interest because in the last week or so I’ve joined several link exchange engines, BlogRush, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, and BumpZee to be exact, and understandably each one requires a reciprocal link on your blog to spread the word. It’s just how they work… others link to you, you link to them. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. Honestly it’s only fair.

So, I oblige. But as cool as widgets can be, they’re getting to be a bit overwhelming. I’ve come to notice that there’s a fine line between promoting one’s blog on all available channels and cluttering up the sidebar with a million widgets that your readers will most likely avoid anyway. Maybe if I had a wider format template… but I haven’t found a wider blog template that I like.

I know there are some people out there reading because Feed Burner tells me I have 6 subscribers…. this is your chance to tell me how to do my job! Any thoughts on which link exchange is best? Tips of the trade to share with me? Help me out!

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