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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Jan
22
(2008)
Turns out the feed for my blog decided to bork about 4 days ago. David sent me a kind note (as he always seems to do about 5 minutes after fecal matter impacts spinning metal) but I couldn’t find wtf was wrong. A few days later, and it’s bugging me, and FeedBurner is choking on the fumes. I try FeedValidator.org, and it’s all “hey! dude! your feed is all like 404, ‘n stuff!” And I was all like “no fracking way. it’s all good, man. haven’t even touched that stuff in a long, long time, brah.” and then FeedValidator says “whatever, dude. I’m telling you, it’s gone. 404. MIA. Fix it.”
I send a message to the FeedValidator listserv (because I can see the feed just fine in my browser and via curl/wget/etc but FeedValidator insists it’s 404), and get 2 responses back within 10 minutes, suggesting my .htaccess was inflicting all kinds of negative foo. I decide to give up on trying to make sense of it, and just replace it with a fresh copy. And it seems to work now.
Anyway, all of this to say “sorry for any RSS noise you might see as a result of my feed’s borkage and subsequent hopeful deborkage.” Of course, this post jynxes it. It’s probably going to bork just to spite me. Fracking blog.
D’Arcy, it’s working now. Don’t tell me I’m the only one who tells you when the feed goes wonky.
Sometimes it’s better not to question why- and just reboot.
I wish I understood why and how to use Feedburner- I just use the generic WP built-ins. Would like to know the pros and cons…
Thanks
@david: you were the only one that mentioned it. I think everyone else was just thankful for the respite
I started using FeedBurner for the performance – it saves the majority of accesses of a feed from going directly to my server, as FeedBurner (now Google) happily serves it out. At the time, my server was performing _very_ poorly, so I was looking for everything I could do to squeeze any extra oomph out of it. But FeedBurner also provides some really nice aggregate and anonymized stats, so I can see activity on my feed – subscribers, trends, as well as uses of the feed on other sites.
The biggest con wrt FeedBurner is that people subscribe to a URL that isn’t under my control. If FeedBurner turns evil, or disappears, subscribers will have to come back to my blog to resubscribe to the non-FeedBurner version of the feed. Not the worst thing in the world, but could be a source of pain somewhere down the road…