Someone somewhere is probably documenting the best way to do this — disentangle yourself from Google’s scuttling of RSS — already…
I turned off Feedburner as the host for my feeds/syndication links. Haven’t seen yet where they appear upon the page so people can pick them up directly. I may have to turn it back on until I can figure that out.
I may as well remove AdSense as that never yields a blessed thing.
Starting experimenting with a few other things I haven’t touched in awhile…stuffing web access logs into MySQL for some kind of reporting (more than a nightly summary) is something I should have looked at ages ago. Not sure if I have logs all the way back to 2002 (!) or what I’ll have to learn about database design to make this work on my underpowered (Shuttle XPC, dual core P4 at 2.mumble gHz, 1 Gb ram — hey, it came from FreeCycle, what can I say?) server.
Reading this back reminds me that of all the lies I learned in school, the one about the key value in long term employability was the ability to learn and grow is the biggest. From what I see in the market, it means “we want people who have already learned the stuff we want on someone else’s time. We’re not interested in your ability to learn if we have to pay for it.” Buzzwords, TLAs, commoditized protocols and standards, not deep understanding or experience, rule the day.