Stalled Email Feed Needs Manual Restart

Here's a heads-up. I noticed a huge drop in my feed stats last night. Bigger than could be explained by a few people unsubscribing, which of course happens constantly. People check out a feed for a few days, then decide it's not for them. I've seen those little daily quivers in my stats. This time, though, the number of subscribers plunged dramatically. On checking further, I noticed that FeedBlitz, the email feed service that I use, was not in the list.

When I logged into FeedBlitz to check, I learned that the feed was stalled. At some point in the last few days, the feed must have been down when FeedBlitz attempted to access it. What's worse — and here's what's important to know — you have to restart it manually from the FeedBlitz dashboard. It won't restart by itself!

To reset it, click on manage your subscriptions. The feed name will appear beside a group of icons. A stalled feed will have a red icon beside it, rather than the usual green. You need to turn it green again, which you can do by clicking on the green check mark.

This little burp has got me wondering if the same thing can happen with the dozens of feed readers and aggregators that people are using to access this blog.

I guess, in the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal, but it's a pain.