Google aqquired Feedburner back in July of 2007 and since then the search engine giant have slowly being making changes to the web feed management service. The most recent highly discussed of these changes being the migration of feeds from Feedburner to Google’s own feedburner.google.com.

Google posted an update on their ‘AdSense for Feeds‘ blog on Monday detailing more reasons as to why moving over to Google was important, and why doing it sooner is better. For example, the post details:

“February 28th, if you have not moved your feeds to a Google Account, the traffic to your feeds will not be cut off or terminated, but you will not be able to view or manage your feeds until you have moved to a Google Account” Steve Olechowski and Matt Shobe, on behalf of the AdSense for Feeds/FeedBurner Team

Some people are having difficulties in completing the migration, although personally I had very few troubles. One major problem for many seems to be subscriber counts altering upon moving to Google. Have you transfered your feeds, if not be sure to, and if so, has your subscriber count suffered?

2008 was an interesting year. ChrisBrandrick.com had somewhat of a rollercoaster year, some months having more posts than others and at times my blog experience lots of traffic to nearly none. This is my ‘Year In Review – 2008′.

January

In January of 2008 I made a total of 18 blog posts, covering such topics as promoting your RSS feed for free, adding a favicon to your site, and of course my goals for the year (which I will review in an upcoming post). The site received over 1,300 unique visitors from a variety of places including the UK, US, Japan, Brazil, Australia and so on. Back in January I had just under 5 or so subscribers to my RSS feed. This is also the month I started to heavily use Entrecard, as can be seen by this January blog post.

February

February saw 20 blog posts being published onto the site, two more than that in January, and this month I was clearly feeling generous as every Wednesday was an opportunity to win some prizes, in what I dubbed ‘Winning Wednesdays‘. Winning Wednesdays was an effort on my behalf to attract more subscribers to my blog, and due to the regularity of prizes, ranging from free blog reviews, entrecard credits, to cold hard cash, it clearly worked as my subscribers jumped from a pitiful amount in January to over 70 subscribers by the end of February. Running contests in addition to other content such as, how to install gravatar support on your blog, giving some link love on valentines day, and my findings on facebook advertising, was a massive help for improving traffic also, as February’s traffic was more than double that of January, coming in at over 2,600. In February I also began using the Kontera plugin in an effort to further monetize my blog.

March

The month of March saw a drop in posts, down to only 11. As for why my posting frequency dropped I’m unsure, but either way it seems to be the start of a dissapointing trend for less blog output throughout the year. During March I blogged about the progress being made on the development of my gaming site Gamebrit, the then upcoming version of Wordpress 2.5, along with how to watch videos in high quality on You Tube. Despite posting considerably less in the month of March, visitor numbers remained encouragingly ‘high’ coming in at just shy of 2,500 uniques.

April

Not a lot happened here at ChrisBrandrick.com during the month of April, and I only managed to post four times. This complete drop off in post frequency was down to personal matters, such as sorting out and actually moving house. It wasn’t all bad though, as I managed to share with you how awesome of an application GrabUp for the Mac is. Also back in April I upgraded wordpress to the then current version of wordpress 2.5!

May

In a very similar fashion to April, May suffered from a lack of blog posts, only this time it was due to my internet connection not being installed for nearly over a month, not at all a good thing when you work online, in addition to this I also had University work and an exam to prepare for! I sure did spend a lot of time at my local coffee shop using the WiFi that month, yet still only managing five blog posts, one of which detailing how to follow me on twitter!

June

One post. During June I only posted once. Not cool. The only post I did make was explaining why I wasn’t posting, reason being of course I was in the process of starting up a new company with a few good friends of mine. Kufu Design LLP is the name, and web design is our game, check us out! Suprisingly enough I still pulled in more than 1,000 unique visitors. Oh and at this point in the year, I had not gained any RSS subscibers, but lost about 10 or so.

July

A slight increase in blogging returned to the site for the month of July, despite me speding two weeks of it on holiday in Turkey! During July I blogged a total of 7 times, twice about the aforementioned holiday, along with updates on my photography over at flickr and my page rank increase. Unique visitor counts were up on the previous month.

August

During the month of August over 1,200 of you stopped by to see what was going on, and I was clearly enjoying my summer to much! Not only was I working at Kufu, but I was also getting ready to attend the annual music festival at Leeds! In addition to that music related blog entry I also updated on what was going on over at WooThemes and how twitter decided to drop support for SMS updates for those in the UK, a sad day for us UK based twitter folk…

September

This month I returned back to University to commence my final year of my degree, so naturally i blogged about it, along with how Google Chrome was introduced, how the iPhone was hitting Pay & Go and another update on yet another WooThemes release. Traffic increased this month to over 2,000 uniques, most of them coming to read about the release of Googles browser.

October

In October I posted 8 times, and during this spooky month I posted a fair number of reviews, in a somewhat successful effort to generate income via my blog. All of October’s posts can be found here, including one revealing details on how my gaming website project ‘Gamebrit‘ is going.

November

Novemeber only saw four posts, including more reviews, and word on how Google had finally added theme selection to their email service GMail. During November my RSS subscriber count stablized at around the 50 mark at which it has remained since.

December

A disappointing end to the year with only two blog entries, one of which was Entrecard releated, the other wishing all my readers (thats you!) a very merry christmas!

An epic blog post I’m sure you will agree, but that is my year in review of what went down here at ChrisBrandrick.com during 2008. Be sure to look out for my goals for 2009, (and a review of my 08 goals) soon along with more blog updates!

Gmail, the popular email service from Google which launched back in 2004 and is still in some form of beta, yesterday announced that a choice of themes are now available, this news comes only days after the Gmail team added loads of new ‘labs’ options along with video chat right within Gmail. The themes are being introduced to allow users to spice up the look of there inbox, if they so desire.

All you have to do if you want to change the look of your favorite email service is head on over to the settings page, and hit the theme tab, once there you will be presented with a healthy selection of new themes to choose from, ranging from simple colour tweaks to radical background changes. I think I will probably just go for a simple colour change as I like the simplicity of my ever busy inbox.

lol

If you can’t see the option to choose a theme yet, fear not, as Google are rolling out the update to all users over the next few days. Be sure to let me know what theme you choose by leaving a comment.

Yesterday Google announced they will finally be entering the browser market, and I can only hope Internet Explorer and Firefox are ready.

The Google browser will be known as ‘Google Chrome’ and hopes to be a better browser that adapts more suitably to the web of today. A lot more detail on the browser can be seen in this comic (38 pages) that Google have released, it goes in to good detail as to what to expect and how the browser handles certain tasks, for example resource management, javascript, and security.

The browser promises stability, security and speed, and I have no doubt that the team at Google will deliver. The browser will apparantly be availble for beta sometime today, so keep an eye out on the official Google blog.

Over the last week or so the current round of Google page rank (PR) updates have been rolled out. And ChrisBrandrick.com went from a 0 to a page rank of 4.

For those of you unfamiliar with page rank, it is Google’s method of rating the importance of a website within the web as a whole. So for example a site with more presence and links will supposedly be ranked higher than those without. Google explains Page Rank like so:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Now many debate that the Google Page Rank may not be as important as it once was, especially to advertisers, but it still holds value and is a small indication as to whether your site is making an impact on the web. With this in mind, I’m celebrating the fact, so for the month of August advertising on ChrisBrandrick.com is only $10. $10 gets you one months exposure on the right sidebar in the available 125×125 spot. Interested? Just drop me an email at chrisbrandrick@gmail.com or leave a comment.

GoFirefox is a site I set up over a year ago to see and experiment with how much could be earned from Google’s Firefox download scheme. The scheme is part of AdSense and offers users the chance to download the Firefox browser with the Google toolbar pre-installed. The site is simply designed, offers a brief explanation of what Firefox can offer and of course a download area. The site has been bringing in a few dollars each day ever since launch and ranks well in Google for various Firefox searches.

I currently have both the .net and .co.uk, but the majority of travel comes via the .net domain. Currently my plan is to advertise the site some more (I currently have some banner ads in place on a site or two), and optimize the site some more to rank higher.

So that’s my (albeit brief) plans for GoFirefox, continue, promote, and so on…if you need Firefox (which you do) be sure to download the Windows version at my site. GoFirefox