Feed Me!

I never claimed to have mad computer skillz, y'all. All those seem to have gone to my geeky older brother who's an I.T. guy (and who, speaking of geeky, just requested from the barber that his hair be cut into a mullet. On purpose). So all this blog stuff has been trial-and-error for me, right from the start. Usually, though, even when something is difficult I can muddle through it and figure it out eventually.

But one of the biggest issues I've grappled with has been my blog feed. Now, before blogging, I thought "a feed" was when I attacked an all-you-can-eat buffet with my game face on. Apparently, though, a blog feed is necessary if you want people to be able to subscribe. So like a good little blogger, I went to Feedburner and made myself one.

Except ... I had zero subscribers. ZEE. RO. Even when I was getting new followers, my feed subscriptions stayed at a big fat nothing. So I concluded that there must be something wrong with it. And I changed it. And I changed it again.

Finally, after the latest tweak, I had the brilliant idea of subscribing to it myself. That way, if it came to my inbox, I'd know that the feed was working. And lo and behold - I started getting The Frump, right in my email! And then, what do you know: I suddenly had five whole subscribers. My Feedburner feed was working! Yay! *jazz hands*

But here's where the situation gets sticky. Apparently, I can't leave well enough alone, and I still thought that maybe something wasn't kosher with my feed. I mean, five subscribers? Really? So the other day, when I read a post over at Our Mommyhood about setting up Feedburner, I got all excited about the advice. "This must be the problem!" I thought, as I eagerly inserted my Feedburner address into the "Post Feed Redirect URL" box in my Blogger settings (while completely ignoring - and then stupidly erasing - whatever address was already there. D'oh!).

I know. This is boring stuff, right? You guys are probably dropping like flies out there. But bear with me.

After that, I wrote a post. And got, like, one or two comments. And then the next day I wrote another post. And got, like, one or two comments. And so on. I started to feel like I must be really lame, and it caused me to eat a dangerous amount of pie. From, you know, anxiety. Like why-does-no-one-like-me-all-of-a-sudden-and-is-my-stuff-really-that-lame anxiety.

Then last night, on my Facebook page, the incredibly awesome Johi mentioned that my blog updates weren't showing up in her blogroll. That's when I put two and two together, and figured out it must have something to do with my "feed tweaking." And I was all, "OMG! This means I'm not lame after all! Lalalalalaaaaa!!"

But then I was all, "Damn. This sucks." Because ... I don't know how to fix it. So there are possibly legions of people out there who have no idea I'm blogging, and they're wondering why the silence. They probably think I'm just busy being awesome, but really, nothing could be further from the truth.

So anyway. Does anyone have any ideas for me? I need some technical help. And possibly some psychological help, but that can come later.

... If anyone sees this post, that is. *sniff, sniff*