Shaun Duke
Shaun Duke is an aspiring writer, a reviewer, and an academic. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing at Bemidji State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and studies science fiction, postcolonialism, digital fan cultures, and digital rhetoric.
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Why I Stopped Paying Attention to Feedburner Subscriber Numbers
Reading Time
Readers of this blog probably haven’t noticed, but the little chicklet/button for Feedburner disappeared from my sidebar about a month ago. The Twitter one, however, has stayed fixed in place (mostly so people can easily find my account; the feeds for my blog are linked above the Twitter gizmo). There’s a good reason, too.
One of the things that I have noticed since the disappearance of Google Reader is the unreliability of Feedburner subscriber numbers. They’ve never been terribly reliable, for sure, but the death of GR resulted in a massive drop off in subscriber numbers for my blog, and, it seems, a whole lot of weird fluctuations throughout the blogosphere. For example, in a matter of hours (yesterday), SF Signal’s subscriber numbers went from 19k, then down to 4k, then up to nearly 21k, then down to 15k, and so on. For a site like SF Signal, I suppose those drops are meaningless, since the popularity of the blog can be easily measured via other means (a vibrant comments section
and site views). For a blog like mine, where I babble about things I like, there isn’t a whole lot of that kind of activity, so measuring popularity relies on subscriber numbers.
But watching the numbers for my blog plummet by hundreds after the death of GR made me rather anxious, and after a time, I became aware that I had put too much attention into how many people read my blog, and not enough attention elsewhere. And since Feedburner, thus far, hasn’t demonstrated the ability to catch numbers from cloud-based RSS readers (like Feedly), I also realized that there isn’t a point even paying attention to the numbers anymore. People read my blog. They are now commenting more (in part, I think, because I took all of the barriers away). Whether I have 400 subscribers, 800, 100, 12, or 47.5, I think there’s something toxic about fixating on subscriber numbers, in part because that means energy I could spend on other things (you know, like blogging interesting things) is spent worrying about where my subscribers went and how I can get them back. I’ve never spent a lot of energy on the numbers, but I’ve come to the conclusion that any time spent thinking about these things is stupid.
So I deleted the chicklet. Feedburner is now merely a RSS dispensary for this blog. And that’s what it’s going to be for the time being. There’s no point sitting around worrying about numbers. If people hate my blog, then they hate my blog because I suck. I trust that someone will tell me as much at some point. If they love my blog, they’ll comment or lurk forever (I will hunt down all of you lurkers eventually). But it’s time to move on now. It’s time to just blog about shit I like.
It’s time to stop caring about the numbers.
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Recent Posts
Book Review: Start Finishing by Charlie Gilkey (2022)
Sometime near the end of the Spring semester, I decided it was time to take another crack and reorganizing my life. I’ve gone through years of on again / off again burnout, some of it my own fault (I’m disorganized and try to do too much) and some of it a consequence of things about which I have no control (my former university essentially bankrupted itself, forcing me to find a new job in my field, and I’ve since moved twice — the short version). All that burnout and overfilled plate-ism has made it harder to keep up with grading and find the energy to complete tasks on time. So it seemed only logical to use my university library privileges to borrow a variety of recommend productivity and project management books to see what advice, systems, etc. are out there.
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
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