Sunday, December 9, 2007
Problems with WordPress syndication
A while back I noticed a problem with my rss feed. I initially blamed Feedburner. My blog wasn’t always updating on the syndication side of things. I would write a new post and it wouldn’t always show up in the feed. I ended up removing Feedburner and just going with the syndication built right into WordPress.
I thought that fixed it. I was wrong.
I noticed a couple of days ago that Bent Corner was no longer showing up on Comic Web Blog Updates. It’s a site that you can go to and see a list of blogs dedicated to comic books. When one of the blogs listed with the site posts a new blog post, the blog along with the title of the new post is shown on the site. It’s a good way to keep up with what’s going on in the comic book blogosphere.
I noticed that the Comic Web Blog Updates website was still using my old Feedburner feed to get updates. I emailed the administrator and asked if he could update to the new WordPress feed. I got a response that evening saying that he tried to run the new feed through a feed validator and it came back as an invalid feed. What?
Sure enough, he was right. If you submit the regular built-in WordPress feed (http://www.bentcorner.com/feed/) to one of the feed validators, you will get a “Server returned HTTP Error 404: Not Found” error. You would think with an error such as this, the feed wouldn’t work at at. You would be wrong. The feed seemed to work. I could subscribe to it and see a list of the last 10 posts.
I tried everything. I reinstalled WordPress. I tried deactivating all of my plugins. I tried using different themes. I scoured the WordPress forums. A lot of help that turned out to be. I tried everything I could think of. I spent the majority of Friday night and much of the following morning working on this problem. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
I then stumbled upon something strange. Though none of the built-in syndication feeds for posts would validate, the built-in feed for comments (http://www.bentcorner.com/comments/feed/) validated fine. I couldn’t come up with the reason why the feed for comments worked, but the feeds for posts did not.
I then stumbled onto something that seemed to fix the problem. If I tried using the entire syndication php file, it worked.
- http://bentcorner.com/feed/rss2/ - Does not work.
- http://bentcorner.com/wp-rss2.php - Works.
I don’t know why this is happening and frankly, I’m way past even caring. I do know that I wish I had never decided to move from Blogger to WordPress. I didn’t decide to create a blog so I could spend hours troubleshooting problems. WordPress requires too much work.
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You could always switch back to blogger and still keep the bentcorner.com domain.
Yeah, but there is no way to export all of my existing posts from WP to Blogger. I’ve even asked the Internet. The Internet said it couldn’t be done unless I manually copy and pasted posts from WP to Blogger. Also, there isn’t a way to transfer over any comments.
Ah, and I was even wondering if I should switch to WordPress. Now I think I should just stay put! Blogger’s not perfect, but I can handle the bumps.
Jenn, it just depends on what you want to do with your blog. If you want to be constantly upgrading and fixing your blog, then make the switch to WordPress. If you would rather just concentrate on writing posts, stick with Blogger.
I’ve since found a Python script that will enable you to export 50 WP posts at a time over to Blogger. The 50 limit is because of something Blogger has in place to stop people from mass producing spam blogs.
Of course manually moving posts over to Blogger wouldn’t be so difficult if I just stopped posted to this blog and instead posted over to my Blogger blog.
I might just go the manual route. I have 11 days off over the holidays so I do have some extra time on my hands.
Could you modify the .htaccess file to redirect the feed?