When we separated our company blog from my personal blog Talk of Many Things, I had to migrate our business email subscribers from the latter to the former.
Since I couldn’t find a way to automate this, I resigned myself to doing it manually. Because I’d chosen Feedburner to manage the feed and subscriptions of both blogs, this process was simple.
I first logged onto my Feedburner admin account and downloaded my personal blog’s subscriber list as a CSV file. I then picked up each email address from this list and entered it into the SUBSCRIBE box provided by Feedburner on GTM360 Blog. When I’d first signed up for Feedburner for Talk of Many Things several years ago, clicking the Subscribe button at this stage would have completed the process.
However, with the heightened concern for spam in the intervening years, Feedburner had decided to use CAPTCHAs at this step to prevent automated bots from creating spam mailing lists.
Since Feedburner was acquired by Google by this time, I was bracing myself to see Google’s reCAPTCHAs at this juncture.
I say “bracing” because, as I’d highlighted in If You Must Use A Long Form, At Least Pre-Fill As Much Of It As You Can, reCAPTCHAs are becoming more and more difficult to crack. Of late, I barely succeed 50% of the time in cracking them on the first attempt. If you think I’m exaggerating, try your hand at deciphering some of these recent gems:
Luckily for me, Feedburner continued to use its earlier CAPTCHAs. As you can see from the below sample, they’re much easier to crack.
Referencing its acquisition by Google, Feedburner says on its website:
“Hello, our name is still FeedBurner. Welcome! It took us a while but we moved the whole neighborhood, down to every last tree, beagle, and mailbox, to Google. We hope you like it.”
Well, I don’t know about the tree, beagle and the mailbox but I definitely liked it that Feedburner’s CAPTCHAs have moved to Google.
Otherwise, I’d still be pulling my hair trying to crack Google’s reCAPTCHAs and wouldn’t have had the time or energy to write this post.