Hello there! I’m writing this post especially for those of you who like to read Design Mom blog posts in your inbox. For about a decade, every time I publish a blog post, an email automatically goes out to anyone who signed up to get Design Mom via email. It’s NOT a newsletter, it’s just the exact same blog posts you see on the blog, but in an email format. If I blog that day, you get an email. If I don’t blog that day, you don’t get an email. If I blog 3 times in one day, you’ll get 1 email with 3 posts.
While it’s true that most people read Design Mom on the actual website, not via email, there are still thousands of you who are subscribed to the email service and (I assume) prefer to read my Design Mom blog posts in an email format.
The blog-posts-via-email come to you through a service called Feedburner, which is owned by Google. If you get Design Mom emails from this sender: noreply+feedproxy@google.com, then you are signed up for the Feedburner service.
At the very bottom of those Feedburner Design Mom emails, you’ll see a notice that says:
You are subscribed to email updates from Design Mom.
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.
Email delivery powered by Google
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Lately, I’ve heard from some of you who like to read Design Mom blog posts via email, and you’ve let me know the images aren’t showing up. You’ll get an email with a full house tour interview, but no photos at all! Which is super frustrating.
I looked into it, and the bummer news is that Google is no longer supporting the emails that are delivered through the Feedburner service. So the images are not coming back. And I can’t do anything about it. Further, I plan to stop the service altogether since it’s not delivering properly anymore. That means the Design Mom blog post emails you’re used to receiving, often daily, are going to stop coming to your inbox.
So what are your options? What if you want to keep seeing the Living With Kids home tours? Or getting updates about my family’s life in France? Here’s what I can suggest:
1) You can always go to DesignMom.com and you’ll see all the latest blog posts — home tours, recipes, updates, etc. The photos will all be there too! You can check daily — typically I publish a post 4 or 5 times each week (though when I’m busy, it happens less). Or you can check once a week and catch up on all the most recent posts at one time.
2) You can subscribe to my newsletter. I have a newsletter that is separate from the blog, but it often has links to recent blog posts on Design Mom. So if you get the newsletter in your inbox, even if the main topic of the newsletter isn’t interesting to you, you can still open it up and find helpful links to current Design Mom posts.
The newsletter is published about 3 times per month, and just like the Design Mom emails you’re used to receiving, it’s free for anyone to read. You can sign up for the newsletter here. (You can also choose a paid newsletter subscription if you’d like to support my work — paid subscriptions keep the newsletter ad and sponsor-free.)
Thank you so much for reading Design Mom in your inbox for all these years. I hope you’ll stick around.
kisses,
Gabrielle
Your photos also stopped showing up in Feedly – where I’ve been reading for many years!
That’s really good to know. I’m not familiar with Feedly, but unless it’s also part of Feedburner, then your experience would indicate that something about my RSS feed has changed, which would mean it’s not necessarily a Feedburner issue.
Hmmm. I’ll need to do some more research.
Okay. I did some more digging. It looks like I can replace Feedburner with another email service provider (like Mailchimp or Constant Contact) but they are both paid services. Additionally, it sounds like if I’m willing to install some plugins, I might be able to get the images to show up in feedly again.
Both of these options would require time and money investments on my part, and I can’t really justify them at the moment. Dang. It’s really hard to justify giving attention to RSS services when it sure seems like they are going away.
Are they going away? That’s the only way I read blogs – and subscribe to dozens.
I don’t know how hard it is to maintain an RSS connection for your website posts, but I would be happy to click through to the blog from Feedly if the images don’t show up in the Feedly interface.
I also saw that Feedly can now (I think) keep track of website updates without special RSS functionality.
Maybe your Feedly readers will just have to update their settings in Feedly so the app checks your website and informs them of updates?
I would be bummed to lose my Feedly updates but also bummed for you to spend extra time finagling it for free.
Ah here it is for curious Feedly users:
https://blog.feedly.com/easily-follow-websites-that-dont-have-rss-feeds/
I came to say the same thing about Feedly.
Same!
Another Feedly user over here. Even before images disappeared, I would always read the first bit of the post and, if it was something I was interested in, would click over to the blog. I know reading on Feedly doesn’t get you the metrics that someone clicking to the blog does so I try to support the blogs I follow on Feedly by clicking over often. (Side note to a comment about RSS feeds losing popularity… I wouldn’t read nearly as many blogs as I do now if I lost Feedly. And since I’m trying to step away from a lot of social media and be more mindful of where I give my time/clicks on those platforms, I’d miss a lot of my favorite bloggers content! I appreciate that I can go to one site and see who’s posted what and what I want to read now vs save for a rainy day when I have more time.)
Ha, same here. I love feedly to read long-read stuff when I have time. If I get newsletters I often delete them in bulk because I’m busy and my inbox has way too many things to read. I actually quite like no pics in Feedly for DM, as it loads quicker and yes I also just click through if it’s something I think I’d like to see the pics.
I came here to say exactly that! Even though images don’t always show up in Feedly anymore, I can easily click over and read the post on the blog. But I LOVE Feedly because I can check it 2-3 times per week, instead of every day, and posts are curated and waiting for me. If a blogger I follow has posted 5 times since the last time I read, there will be 5 posts waiting for me. I especially love it for the blogs I follow that seldom post. I would never remember to go check them on a regular basis!
I am another Feedly user for your blog and all the others I follow. It’s a good option for people who forget or can’t make time to visit multiple websites daily just to see if someone may have updated their content. As the other commenter below stated your images stopped appearing awhile ago, and I don’t think when you cross-post instagram stories to the blog it shows up well. It’s not a huge deal…I look at the text and I’ve I’m interested I click over to the blog to read and look at the photos. But it was nice when they were there!
also if it’s helpful to know Feedly says you have approximately 14,000 followers via their service.
Also a Feedly user. Also noticed that it hasn’t caught quite every post of yours in the last couple of months. If it seems like I haven’t seen one lately then I click through to the website. And that’s cool, I really enjoy your content and have appreciated that you’ve laid out the effort you put into creating it, so I wouldn’t ask you to go to extra lengths just to save us an extra click!
I tested out a service called blogtrottr on behalf of a family member and found that to work well – it’s free and functions as a way to put an RSS feed to an email (I’ll forward you a version of what it looks like)
https://blogtrottr.com/
I have been clicking your post titles in the emails to get to your site when the pictures are missing. I would assume this is really what you would want anyways? Doesn’t clicks to your website give you data (and sponsor data) that you can’t get if we read your entire post embedded in an email? Most of the other email blog posts I subscribe to only give you a teaser of the post so that you must click to get to the blog site. After the first few sentences of the blog, it will have a highlighted link line something like “Read the post “. I have always assumed that is because they want to drive traffic to their actual site. I am more than happy to continue to click to your site if you choose to continue email blasting your posts. Do whatever works for you, no pressure as you shouldn’t have to spend more time or money for those of us hanging on via email :) Thanks for sharing your content with us.