Of blogs, feeds and other useful tools

In today's post I will take the opportunity to comment you some technical matters which can be interesting for blog following and recovering of information of unavailable websites.

All of you having blogs in the Blogger platform by Google surely have received an electronic mail informing that the Following by Mail widget used by Feedburner will cease to work on July of 2021. This communication have made some people to move their blog to another platform or even cease their blogger activity and use other diffusion means for the contents they create (even erasing all the posts of the blog), taking for granted that the countdown culminating in the Blogger service closure has started.

I have to admit I don't fully understand the reason why the author of a blog who freely shares his pleasure for a hobby decides in a given moment to close it or erase it so he prevents acess to the contents. Of course people are free to do whatever they want with their time and their creations, but this is an action that, in my opinion, I find quiete drastic, because doing so removes information other people could find to be useful and interesting and truthfully, this blog can still be available if only to give value to the effort and hours that have been dedicated to its creation and maintenance.

But hey, I better stop tantrums and get to the point: as I have explained at the beginning of the post, the coming disappearance of the functionality of the FollowByEmail widget by Blogger will make impossible to receive the notification of new contents of the blog in the mail inbox, so it's advisable to all those interested in receiving automatically these notifications to use a technology that has remained in full force since its inception in 2000: subscription to feeds through RSS or Atom

To be able to visualize these feeds it's necessary to use an adequate program or browser extension, I propose you the extensions Brief (Mozilla addons | Github), very easy, or Feedbro (Mozilla addons | Nodetics), which offers more functions, like creation of rules to managed inbound feed posts or the possibility of apply filters by tags. Assuming that neither of both options satisfies you, you can also see the lists of alternatives to Brief (219 options) and to Feedbro (232 options) appearing in AlternativeTo as well as the list of RSS complements for Firefox (406 options).

Regarding other platforms for hosting blogs (assuming there comes a time when Blogger ceases its activity) the more obvious option is Wordpress (Wordpress.com | Wordpress.org), although there are many other options, like those contained in this other list by AlternativeTo (165 options).

To finish this post I remind you that if you want to save Internet contents you have at your disposal the Print Friendly service, allowing users to print and save PDF of web pages and webmasters to include a print button to access this service (something that my blog have from the beginning) and the Wayback Machine by Archive.org, dedicated to collecting Internet websites (in fact it already automatically stores copies of my blog) and users can also suggest URLs to save using the Save Page Now option.

This entry it's also available in the following languages:
Castellano Català