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?

As promised earlier in the month, I would come back and review which of my goals I reached that I set in 2008. I somehow don’t think I did to well, but the way I figure, I can’t move forward and set new goals or even revised goals, without overlooking those I have set in the past. You need to look back in order to go forward.

So without further a due, lets get the ball rolling and take a look at the goals set back in Janurary of 2008.

1. Get a custom blog design – Fail

As with any good blog a custom design is a must, and ever since opening my blog I have been using the free theme you are currently seeing, which of course means I failed in getting a custom theme for my blog online in 2008. Although this goal is/was not a complete failure, I started to create a custom design very early on last year, but for one reason or another, decided not to use, despite developing it nearly to completion. I may end up finishing of the theme and releasing it for free, who knows. But ever since deciding against using the above as a theme, I began working on a new design, one which created more of a personal branding for myself and my blog, and what I want the blog to be overall. Hopefully, that should be online soon, but it seems I always end up wanting to tweak, so don’t hold your breath!

2. Increase blog earnings – Success

I pointed out that although my blog was a place for me to detail my online activity, I also wanted to use it as a revenue stream. I detailed how I would like to earn about £100 per month from my blog, and although I didn’t reach this goal, I did earn a somewhat regular income from my blogging activity, mainly through writing reviews. I shall continue to do so, and hopefully it will become more of a regular part of my blogging overall. In addition to reviews, other income methods will be integrated in to my blog.

3. Learn to drive – Fail

“I hope to learn and pass my driving test, thats the goal. Buying a car is not.” - That’s what I said back in January of last year, and I can safely say I came nowhere close to passing this goal. I do have my provisional licence now which enables me to learn, but as of yet I have taken no lessons. I figure failing this goal came down to a lack of desire, and no need at current to drive, public transport does me fine. As to whether it does in the future, who knows, either way I need to learn eventually.

4. Blog More – Success

Despite saying I was hoping to blog at least five times a week, which I clearly did not, I am marking this one as a success anyway, as my posting frequency did improve to a level at which I am now happy with. I think making more regular short posts while ok, may not be deemed as valuable, content wise, as more infrequent larger posts. Your thoughts?

5. Launch WebmasterPlay – Fail

A central hub for videogame webmasters, ‘webmasterplay’ didn’t see the light of day in 2008, and I am really bummed out about that as it’s a project I have been longing to get on the road, but it requires a lot of attention, which it just didn’t see due to work on Gamebrit, and starting Kufu.

6. Increase RSS Subscriptions – Success

By no means did I hit my projected goal of 500, but i did increase my subscriber count from it’s initial zero. This can only continue to rise by promoting it more, and integrating subscriber opportunities into my blog more effectively.

7. Get into my final year of University – Success

I am currently in my final semester of my final year of University, meaning I acheived my goal of getting into my final year of my Web Technology degree. For my final degree project I am making a website which I hope will be usefull to a lot of freelancers in the online space, so be sure to catch some future blog posts about that.

8. Launch and make a success of Gamebrit – Success

After a hefty development period and many delays Gamebrit finally launched in the summer of 2008, August to be precise. I outlined in my goals how I wanted the site to be attracting a minimum audience of at least 15,000 uniques per month before the end of 2008. It reached that goal, and then some, reaching over 50k in December. Keeping up this momentum is key to the success of the site.

9. Purchase an iMac – Fail

This just did not happen. Plain and simple, other things came about, like my holiday to Turkey, going to Leeds festival, and moving house yet again. It was always somewhat of a dream goal, but hey, we can all dream. Maybe 2009 will bring me some desktop apple joy.

10. Increase overall earnings – Fail

Sure I made money online in 2008, than I did in 2007, but not to a level I was happy with, I’m mainly putting this as a failure as a means to motivate myself further. Let’s see the potential.

So that makes a total of five successful goals, to five failed ones. I met you in the middle 2008. With this reflection done, it’s useful in scoping future goals and what I can and can’t reach. Look out for my 2009 goals soon. How was 2008 for you?

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!

As some of you who follow me on Twitter or have me added on Facebook may have realised I am now back in the UK, after my holiday away to Turkey. I had a really nice break away, and you can now check out the pictures of my trip on my Flickr page, I also have some on my Facebook too.

Now I’m back I would also like to announce that Kufu (as previously blogged) is now officially open for business, and we are on the look out for new clients. So drop us an email!

In addition to working for Kufu, the rest of my summer will involve finally getting Gamebrit off the ground, which has been ridiculously delayed for several reasons, it’s amazing to think I have had the domain for nearly a year now! But yeah keep an eye out for updates on that one.

But in the mean time, keep it on ChrisBrandrick.com! Subscribe to my RSS feed, or even add me as a Technorati fave.

Apologies for the delay in posting the results for last weeks winning wednesday competition, but due to being out of town access to the internet was limited.

Last week subscribers to my RSS feed via email had the opportunity to win a custom avatar, review, and more. The winner of last week’s competition is:

Andrew of Mach2Designs. Congratulations! Be sure to check your email for more details.

Last week’s competition was the last in the current run of contests, but to those of you that subscribe to my RSS you need not worry, in the future you will be automatically entered into any similar competitions, and in the mean time you get to read my content from the comfort of your inbox! Keep it on ChrisBrandrick.com for more!

It’s February 27th and that can only mean one thing here at ChrisBrandrick.com, (apart from experiencing an earthquake) it’s Winning Wednesday, and todays competition marks the last in my month long weekly giveaway. So it’s only right that I end on a high note. Up for grabs this week:

• Custom Avatar (Just like last weeks competition)
• Blog Review (I will review your blog free of charge)
• Free 1 Month Advertising here at ChrisBrandrick.com (125×125 ad)
• 200 Entrecard Credits (Entrecard account required)

One lucky email subscriber will win all of the above, and if the winner doesn’t have a blog,  website, or an entrecard account, the prizes will go to the person in second place (if they have all the requirements), and so on until I find a suitable winner. Interested in winning? You should be! All you have to do to win this prize is subscribe to ChrisBrandrick.com via email. So sign up now, and be in it to win it!

This competition will run until Friday at midnight. Good Luck!

Another Wednesday and yet another chance to win! Last week I gave away $50 to one lucky reader and this week I have an all new prize to give away as part of my Winning Wednesday competition!

This week subscribers to my rss email updates have the chance to win a custom drawn avatar, or caricature if you will! Just check the example below of a drawn picture of me:

To get your very own custom avatar like the one above all you have to do is subscribe to my RSS feed via email and if you win, supply me with two photographs of yourself so my friend over at Permanent-Temps.com can draw you up. Having a character drawn up like this is great to use on your blog or personal website! The winner (selected at random) will receive the completed file within a week of sending the two photographs, and only one revision can be made to the drawn picture.

This week I have decided to run this contest for 48 hours, in order for more folks to get a chance at winning this unique prize, so get subscribing! Good luck and don’t forget once you have subscribed you are automatically entered into every other Winning Wednesday this month!

Last week I gave away 500 entrecard credits for my first ‘winning wednesday‘ competition, this week $50 USD is up for grabs!

As detailed in my earlier post all you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is subscribe to my rss feed via email, simple! Of course if you have already subscribed to my blog via email you will be automatically entered into the prize draw.

Be sure to keep a look out on your inboxes for any winning emails. Winners will also be revealed here on the blog. The winner will be picked at random via the services of Random.org. Payments will be made in US dollars via PayPal. A PayPal account is required.
You only have 24 hours, so get subscribing! Good luck and don’t forget once you have subscribed you are automatically entered into every other Winning Wednesday this month!

For the first winning wedensday here at ChrisBrandrick.com the prize is simply 500 entrecard credits. If you don’t know what entrecard is, or haven’t signed up for this blogging service yet, be sure to read about it here.

As detailed in my earlier post all you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is subscribe to my rss feed via email, simple! Of course for this competition you also have to be an entrecard member so I can deliver your prize.

The winner will be announced early Thursday (tomorrow) morning, so be sure to keep a look out on your inboxes for any winning emails. Winners will also be revealed here on the blog. Oh and for those of you interested the winner will be picked at random via the services of Random.org.

You have 24 hours, so get subscribing! Good luck and don’t forget once you have subscribed you are automatically entered  in every other Winning Wednesday this month!

Throughout the whole month of February every Wednesday here at ChrisBrandrick.com will be a Winning Wednesday.

What is a winning wednesday you ask? Well, on every wednesday throughout february I will be giving away a prize, the details of the prize will be revealed on the winning wednesday itself, and the chance to win lasts only 24 hours, as the draw will take place at or around midnight. All you have to do to be entered into the weekly draw is subscribe to my RSS feed via email. Current email subscribers will automatically be entered, and if you subscribe now you will be automatically entered into every winning wednesday this month! So with four chances to win, this month is one to watch on ChrisBrandrick.com

See you on wednesday for this first prize draw!