Calling all subscribers to my RSS feed

If you’re a subscriber to my RSS feed, I need you to change your settings. Keep reading.

At some point this evening, this blog will record its 50,000th page view as registered by WordPress.com’s built-in stats system. It’s taken me precisely two years and ten days to reach that milestone: I wrote my first proper blog posts on 23 December 2005, making (as it turned out) some observations which still ring true. Just as well, really.

Will the champagne cork be popping? Probably not – as it happens, we’ve got a bottle of Joseph Phelps Napa Valley red lined up for tonight. (But I digress.) The reality is, ‘total page views’ means absolutely nothing in a blog context. The figure which means much more to me is the number of RSS feed subscribers… round about 100, as best I can measure it, with 70% using Google Reader, and 20% Bloglines. And in all likelihood, since I’m quite happy to distribute my ‘full content’ feed, I bet those 100 hardcore readers rarely (if ever) contribute to the ‘page views’ total.

So, having hit the magic/meaningless 50k mark, it’s time to do something I’ve been putting off for some time. WordPress.com has served me well, but with so much of my work these days centring around local WordPress installations, the only sensible thing to do is move away from wordpress.com, and blog properly on my puffbox.com company site.

In preparation for this, can I ask all RSS feed subscribers to switch to my new Feedburner-based RSS feed, located at feeds.feedburner.com/simondickson. Then, when I make the jump over to the new puffbox.com, I’ll repoint Feedburner to the new feed URL, and you won’t miss a thing. I’ll still be blogging at wordpress.com for a couple of weeks, but the plan is to launch the new puffbox.com in time for Jeremy Gould’s UKGovWeb BarCamp at the end of the month.