Two tips.

If you’re taking everyone up on their requests to change to their new feeds because they’ve dropped FeedBurner, you will find yourself with duplicate feeds in Google Reader, how do you tell which one to keep and which to delete?

If you’re switching your blog from Feedburner to your native feed, you’ll want to know how to find out how many subscribers you have in Google Reader.

Eliminate Duplicate Feeds

As people drop FeedBurner, they are posting notices like this one at Beth Fish Reads: Subscription (RSS) Issues and Updates. These posts ask you to subscribe to their new feed. Only problem is, after I did that for her blog and several others, I was getting two copies of every post in my Google Reader. I love y’all, but I only need to see one copy of each post.

So, how do you delete the old feed and keep the new one? On the left side of the Google Reader window, mouse over Subscriptions. A tiny arrow will appear on the right. Click it and select the option “Manage Subscriptions.” A list of all the blogs that you’re subscribed to will come up. Scroll down to “Beth Fish Reads” (for example). There I see two feeds. The second one has the words “feedblitz” in it. Since she said in her post that’s the one she’s using, I’ll keep that and remove the other by clicking on the trash can.

Find the number of your subscribers in Google Reader

Since lots of us are switching back from Feedburner to our native feeds as suggested by the mini-challenge at Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Books (Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: CHANGING YOUR RSS FEED) I thought you would want to know how to check how many subscribers you have in Google Reader. Feedburner gave us a number of subscribers. That was everyone, no matter what RSS reader they were using. But I think we can be sure that most book bloggers, librarians, and writers are using Google Reader if they are using an RSS reader at all. So, knowing the number of subscribers in Google Reader will get you a good idea of how many people are seeing your RSS feed.

It’s clunky to find (if anyone has a better way, let me know), but it’s there, so here goes:

1. At the Google Reader home page, click on Browse for Stuff in the left column — it’s the last selection in the top block.
2. That brings up a sub-page that has tabs across the top. Click on the Search tab.
3. Type the name of your blog in the Search box.
4. The search will find posts with your name, including ones on your blog. The number of subscribers to each blog is listed next to the search results.

For reference, FeedBurner says I have 192 subscribers. Google Reader says I have 122. Fourteen of the FeedBurner subscribers were email. It looks like a lot of the rest were using Firefox. So, it’s not perfect, but it’s enough to get a reasonable idea of where you stand with subscribers.

Help Me with my Headache?

As comfortable as I am in Google Reader, I’m still quite uncomfortable with Word Press. Did any of you switch from FeedBurner back to the native feed on a self-hosted Word Press blog recently? I would love some hand-holding while I do that. Tweet me (@joyweesemoll) or send me an email (same handle at yahoo.com) or comment on this post. Thanks!