For the past few weeks, I’ve been testing a relatively new service called Bloglet, which allows you to “subscribe” to this site and have daily updates delivered via e-mail. Personally, I prefer using an RSS reader, but some visitors to this site have made it clear they aren’t into RSS, so this is an alternative. It seems to work well enough, and I’m now ready for a wider test of the service. If you want to give it a try, sign up and let me know what you think.

Enter your email address below to subscribe to Ed Bott’s Windows (and Office) Expertise!

powered by Bloglet

The Tip of the Day feature takes next week off. Judy and I will be in Santa Fe, New Mexico, all week, scouting the next stop on our never-ending tour of the United States. Yeah, we’re ready to relocate to a place with four real seasons.

New Mexican bloggers are invited to weigh in with comments and suggestions.

I thought the latest statistics from FeedBurner on who’s subscribed to my feed were interesting. Over the weekend I mentioned in passing that NewsGator had nearly caught up with Bloglines. As of this morning, NewsGator has a big lead, at least in visitors here. Add up the number of subscribers who read this feed in the three NewsGator products and you get 364, which is about a third more than the total for Bloglines.

Reader/Aggregator	Circulation
Bloglines	274
NewsGator Online	225
NewsGator Outlook Edition	95
Firefox Live Bookmarks	76
Onfolio 2.0	48
FeedDemon (NewsGator)	44
My Yahoo	44
RSS Bandit	39
SharpReader	37
Sage	26
Thunderbird	13

There are at least 50 additional named user agents in this list, but none had a share of more than 1%.

OK, I’ve turned the RSS ads back on. I’ve been very impressed with FeedBurner‘s response. They’re great communicators and they know how to take care of customers.

My goal with these ads is to defray the cost of running this site, if only a little. But my first goal has been and will continue to be to provide information that readers find interesting. I don’t tweak my content to fit around the ads, ever. If you find them annoying or obtrusive, please let me know. If you find them valuable, let me know that too!

I’ll have more to say about ads in a few days.

I was horrified to see the wildly inappropriate ad that Overture slipped into my feed (thanks, Thomas, for pointing it out).

For now, I’ve turned off all ads in the feed and won’t turn them back on until I am 100% certain that the problem is resolved – and even then I may leave them off. If you continue to see ads, especially ads that are inappropriate, please let me know.

If you have ever had to suffer through an encounter with a front-line support person for any broadband provider, you will appreciate these twin entries from Gizmodo:

Lies Verizon DSL Support Has Told Me Today: “Phone lines over 14 feet will, over time, fry your modem.”

Lies I Have Told Verizon DSL Support Today: “I have completed all your tests as you requested, including rewiring my house.”

Heh.

If current trends hold, sometime early Thursday morning this site will get its 200,000th unique visitor since I started keeping track of these stats roughly a year ago. I’m honored that so many people have come to visit this place, and I’m especially grateful for all the comments, e-mail, and other feedback you’ve left.

Thanks!

Update: Visitor 200,000 arrived Wednesday, May 25, 2005, at 4:45pm, from somewhere in Canada. So thanks, eh?

That’s my friend David in the background.

Next week, back to work. Sigh…

Oh Lordy, this is a great read. If you are offended by strong language, don’t click the link. But if you loved the Good Doctor’s work, or if you have ever played editor, well … this is simply brilliant.