Where were you when Feedly went down?

Last week, for three days in a row, Feedly was targeted by hackers looking for ransom in a huge DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. It meant that nobody was able to access Feedly.

If you use Feedly as your RSS reader, it meant that there was no way of accessing all your feeds short of going to each source. We set up RSS readers precisely to avoid having to visit dozens of separate websites and blogs. Feedly being down was definitely an inconvenience (not on the magnitude of Twitter being down, but still).

If you are a blog publisher, and you use RSS as your primary distribution channel, you were really screwed last week. Nobody saw your feed. Few people if any took the time to visit your site to read your latest posts. If they did, it’s too bad you can’t identify them, because they are your most loyal supporters.

There’s a big lesson here for bloggers: you must use various different channels to push out your content.

On social: You have to share on all of your social networks.  If you don’t regularly post your latest stuff to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc., you must start.

On email: Perhaps this is a good time to check out newsletter providers that have the RSS-to-email feature. This feature takes your latest posts and sends them out as a newsletter to your contacts on whatever schedule you choose. You definitely want to make sure people can subscribe to your feed directly too.

In person: Do your friends and colleagues know about your blog? Let them know and encourage them to visit. If you give out business cards, is your blog listed?

I can almost promise you that this won’t be the last time Feedly will be down. Chances are also good that one of the social networks will be attacked too. There’s little you can do to avoid internet failures, but there’s a lot you can do to avoid depending on just one channel of communication.

Where were you (and what did you do) when Feedly went down last week?