With Feedburner’s email service for example, I have no control over the emails that are sent out. With AWeber I’ll be able to create a newsletter service that not only sends out the posts I publish on this blog, but it will also allow me to send out custom written emails. I want to cultivate my newsletter and doing so starts with a service that allows me to do just that.

If you currently subscribe to my email newsletter via Feedburner you’re subscription will automatically be imported to AWeber and you will receive an email asking you to confirm the subscription. Unless you click on the activation link in that email, you will not be added to the new newsletter service. This is because the new newsletter has a double opt-in confirmation feature enabled. Starting tomorrow Feedburner’s email service will be disabled, as AWeber steps in to take over.

I invite you to join Math Blog’s newsletter by providing your first name and email address in the email sign-up on the homepage, or by clicking here.

Thank you to all those who sign up; I look forward to bringing my posts to your inbox via AWeber.

The other day I noticed that a lot of bandwidth consumption was due to external sites who had republished some of our content without permission. It turns out that many of these spammers were “hotlinking”. In other words they didn’t copy the images on their own servers, they simply linked to the original on my servers, to be displayed on their sites. The end result is that they consumed my bandwidth, in an attempt to make money off my content.

It is possible to configure your server to replace each image if the URL serving them is not in your approved list. So I did just that. I authorized *.math-blog.com, a couple of my other sites, including my programming blog, and search engines. For those of you who are into computer programming: I simply wrote some rewrite rules and conditions in my .htaccess file for the Apache web server.

What went wrong? My feeds are served by FeedBurner, a service that Google acquired some time ago. I regretfully forgot to add Google’s service to the list of accepted domains.

I’ve remedied this and everything should be back to normal now. Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience.