Category: ask-the-blog

A collection of questions I’ve asked my readers. If you want to read the collected wisdom of all the readers of the imbroglio, this is a good place to start.

Tune me up

I fear that very soon will be another time in my history when the internets will no longer be easily accessible. ((I have had high-speed internet access for about four years straight. It’s so great, I can’t even imagine life without it. I bed I’d read more books.)) Therefore, I ask you, dear readers:

What music should I make sure I obtain in this last precious week during which I have a nice high-speed connection? What are you listening to these days? What is the one cd or track you think no one should have to live this life without? What do you recommend for a cross-country drive in the jangle wrangle cab of a rented moving truck? Share your suggestions, por favor, and I will be eternally grateful! [tags]music, recommendations[/tags]

Mysteriously missing WordPress RSS feeds: Help?

So much for the grand plan to create a snazzy new blog that is user-friendly and high-tech. Immediately upon welcoming visitors to the site, Jeremy notified me that my RSS feeds weren’t showing up in Bloglines. Ironically, I’ll bet he learned of the problem so quickly via the RSS feed of ambivalent imbroglio, which seemed to work just fine. Grrr.

After looking into the problem for a bit now, I have to admit I’m flummoxed. NewsFire, my RSS reader of choice, was able to find the feeds just fine. Firefox can also discover the feeds and turn them into “live bookmarks” w/out a problem. But no matter what I try, Bloglines insists there are no feeds at theimbroglio.com. Yahoo and Google Reader say the same thing. Can anyone out there offer any advice for making WordPress feeds work in Bloglines, Yahoo, and other online feed readers?

So far I’ve found the Feeds docs on the WordPress Codex and everything appears as it should be there. I’m using custom permalinks so the feed protocol is:

http://theimbroglio.com/feed/

That’s what works in NewsFire and Firefox. The Customizing Feeds doc explains how to modify the feeds, so I’m wondering if a small change there—possibly in the header—would make the feed more recognizable to more readers. Any ideas?

As you can see if you scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar, I installed the Subscribe Me plugin (see all those “subscribe” butttons?) in the hope that it would solve the problem. Sadly it only makes it easier to see that the feed isn’t working on the major online aggregators.

The Feed Validator can see my feed, although it does find a few errors (all generated by plugins, I think). Could any of those errors be the problem?

At least one other person has had the same problem, but her solution doesn’t seem to work here. I tried all variants in Bloglines; no go.

I have a feeling that if I just signed up w/Feedburner and let it handle my feeds the problem would be solved. Like NewsFire and Firefox, Feedburner can also find the feeds w/no problem. I’m not really wild about that idea, but maybe it’s worth a try…
[tags]aggregators, rss, syndication, wordpress, feedburner, bloglines[/tags]