RSS Subscription Glitch

If you’re experiencing an interruption with the RSS feed, please resubscribe – that should fix things.

The feed should be automatically detected by your RSS app. If you need the URL, it can be found here:

https://toolguyd.com/feed/

What is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a way for readers to access ToolGuyd content via 3rd party apps. For example, an app or service like Feedly allows you to quickly view all of the new content from all the websites or publications you are interested in.

Our email newsletter also pulls headlines and images from our RSS feed.

Here’s what I think happened. I say “think” because I’m not sure. I haven’t seen problems on my end, and the first reader to report an issue has told me that resubscribing fixed things.

ToolGuyd is nearly 17 years old. A long time ago, I used Google’s FeedBurner to serve both the RSS feed and to serve an email newsletter that was based on the feed.

Things changed over time, and the built-in RSS feed became easier to detect.

I moved to a new RSS-driven email provider over a decade ago.

FeedBurner discontinued their email services around 4 years ago.

With the native RSS feed provided and easily accessible starting many years ago, rather than being proxied via FeedBurner, and FeedBurner no longer serving emails, it didn’t seem like our account was actually doing anything.

I didn’t realize that the FeedBurner proxy had still been in use. I was under the impression that it was just hooked into ToolGuyd with no modern purpose. So, I deleted the FeedBurner proxy feed. This is something they were bound to do at some point anyway – Google has a habit of pulling plugs on free services.

So… that’s what I think happened. I deleted the presumed inactive FeedBurner proxy feed, and then around the same time the RSS stopped working until readers said they resubscribed.

Oops. Sorry about that. If I had realized that the proxy feed was still in use, I would have at least provided a reminder or two for everyone to switch over.

For anyone who has experienced RSS access issues, please let me know if re-added the site (whether automatically or manually) doesn’t work, and I’ll see what I can do to fix things.

Also, in case you found it interesting, all archive or category pages have their own feeds.

For example:

https://toolguyd.com/category/tool-deals/feed

Work on the website look and layout update has been on hold. There are some feature changes there, and I’ve been building in reversibility. But with the feed issue, assuming that nixing the FeedBurner was the problem, I failed to consider that the old proxy URL was still in use.

Thank you everyone for sticking around for so long, and I’m sorry that I broke things.

If someone can provide me with the now-malfunctioning FeedBurner URL for the proxy feed, I can try to recreate it, but they might not permit it. If they require a non-duplicate URL, then RSS readers would have to resubscribe anyway, in which case the auto-detectable native feed address works to that purpose.