Yup, here I am resurrecting this site and posting about what I am learning about Social Media and such, and I have managed to kill the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) for this site, which is at least ironic, but very infuriating as well.

I first noticed that my previous post Scrapers and How to Trap Them, never showed up the RSS feed even 2 days after it had been posted, so then I started to dig into what may have gone wrong. At first I thought Feedburner had gone off the rails, so I attempted to go through their Troubleshootize page and found out that in fact the Feed for NotHowToDoit.com was timing out.

I then wandered over to Dreamhost, my hosting company, and checked, but no nothing was wrong on their end, so finally I gave up and went to Google, and tripped over the culprit.

Evidently WordPress Plug-ins can and do cause loading issues (slowing things down and such), so I finally came across one which had a very simple methodology:

Turn off every plug in and see if the RSS feed returns, if it does then slowly add plug ins to find out what the culprit might be.

I did that, well I turned most of them off (I left Akismet on, I don’t trust those SPAM commenter). Sure enough my RSS feed returned and Feedburner was able to see it all.

My guess on the culprit after a slow adding of each Plug in, is that SexyBookMarks may have been the tipping point in terms of Plugins, so I have left it off for now and may try it again in a while, but for now, I am enjoying having the RSS feed back for this site.

Moral of the story is, don’t just keep adding Plugins to your WordPress configuration, check them out and add them very slowly and watch for any possible side effects (like say your RSS feed dies).

Spam Comment Update

I have integrated a new plug in to try to stop the Spammers, it is called SI-CAPTCHA-FOR-WORDPRESS and so far it seems to be doing OK. I am still testing, but anything that cuts down the deluge of spam is appreciated.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So for the past two days my Feedburner RSS feed has been dead, which means I am missing my 1000 per day hits there for Google (so a very bad thing). I only realized that this was dead at the end of the first day, and then madly tried to figure out why there were no hits.

At first I thought it was due to me cleaning up my Google accounts, and maybe I had turned off my Feedburner access, but that turned out to be only a Red Herring. Feedburner was working fine, however, it did lead me to their Feed verification program.

I ran the feed verification and it BARFED at a specific line in Here Comes 2011 a post I did on Thursday (on my Mac). The error output was a little cryptic, but it seemed there was a character it didn’t like, so after I had backed up the HTML for the post in Notepad, I started removing characters, but nothing seemed to fix the issue. I finally lost my patience and deleted the entire post contents, and then the Feed went back to normal.

From this I figured that something in the post was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. This morning I remembered that I was experimenting with an Old Mac a friend had given me and tried to write a post on it, and for some reason this may well have inserted an odd character, and sure enough I found it, after looking closely at the Notepad backup that I had. I have no idea what keystroke combinations on the mac created this, but after removing the bad character, I ran the Feedburner Feed Tester and it passed no problem, so my RSS feed is now back up and alive.

Ypromogroup

So I have joined into another Social Media promotion group that will hopefully help with the Social Media work I am doing for THE Canadian Personal Finance web site. This is a keyword group on Twitter that is supposed to help out Yakezie members to promote their posts, doesn’t seem to be doing too much right now, but I’ll keep trying it out for now, and see if it helps.

Social Media

Other than that, I am finding Social media stuff helping, but it is a slow process. My Twitter and Digg readership slowly increases and I have not posted my own stuff onto Stumbleupon for over a week, so those goals are being met, but there does not seem to be a magic bullet for increasing readership (and thus revenues) just yet. Maybe there is a Tipping Point here that once I cross things will get better, who knows?

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

More strangeness with the Financial Site with my RSS feed from feedburner dieing off.  It is not just feedburner but the feed check utility also times out on my server, so I have sent yet another support request to my friends at Dreamhost. Meanwhile my Feedburner subscriber count drops like a stone thanks to my feed looking dead. This site’s RSS seems to be fine, so I am starting to wonder if maybe my WordPress has been hacked or the like, so there may be a new Theme on the Financial Site as well.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American Brother(s) (I actually have a brother who got his green card, and is now as American as it gets). Enjoy your Tur-Duck-En and your football (I will be).

WordPress 2.6.5 has been upgraded on both sites as well.

Epilogue

I must now apologize to Dreamhost since the problem seems to have been I had too many articles in my feed (20) and too much content and Feedburner says specifically that too big a feed is a problem too. I seem to have remedied this with the Most Humblest of Apologies to my friends at Dreamhost.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Thanks to moving over from Feedburner to Google Feedburner, my adsense impressions effectively doubled on the first day, which is a very good thing, I think. More impressions means more possible money to be made, which is a very good thing these days.

A few bumps along the road, the number of subscribers “chiclet” went to ZERO this morning, but that was because it was reading from the Feedburner side, which had been turned off, so after replacing that, it now is back to within 10% of my RSS readership from last week, which is great.

Now I don’t feel like I am losing money having an RSS feed, which is just great!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So for both sites the RSS Feeds have now both been moved, and I will be deleting the interim feed set up for this site.

Working Hard on The Internet RSS Feed is now on this link. Canadian Personal Finance Opinions RSS feed is over here.

Feedburner is now gone, but still here and my readership drops a TONNE again, oh well, if I can make money on a smaller number, so be it!

Need to change the FeedFlare set ups and the Readership Icons again, lots of nit picky little changes to be made, but again, for more money, that is just fine!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1 seems to have gone ok for Canadian Personal Finance Opinions, and is running ok.

John Chow dot Com comes through again with Google Offers Adsense for RSS Feeds, which is great. I hadn’t noticed it on my Adsense page, but I am now signing up for it and hopefully this will add to my adsense revenues (wow if it doubles it, I’ll be working for Cerfs wages and not just slave wages). Haven’t been ok’ed for it yet, but this might be a very good thing.

Have not upgraded this site to 2.6.1 yet, as I am not sure the Theme can withstand changes right now.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

After living through the last upgrade of WordPress and having it break this site and the advertising on my financial site, I figured I would wait a little while until I am sure all of my plug ins and themes are ok’ed on this “dot release” from our friends at WordPress.

Income this week has been steady, but RSS feeds have dropped sharply on the financial site, and I am just not too sure why. It is August and vacations, but I am hoping it is not a real trend, and instead just a blip. Mentioned in the Canadian Capitalist today, so should have a good “bump” from that link (remember the Canadian Capitalist Effect ).

Readership on this site increases slowly but surely as well, which is interesting too, not sure who(m) is reading, but remember I don’t post every day here (but I sometimes end up  writing a lot at once).

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Getting back near 300 for RSS feed readers at Canadian Financial Opinions, which is good to see. No real sign of the page rank changing, but I did send in an appeal e-mail asking for them to reconsider or re-look at what my rank actually is.

Given I am now running WordPress 2.5, I am starting to think about changing the theme on the site, since it looks kind of drab, and doesn’t really entice readership (in my opinion). Guess I can window shop this weekend, and see what 3 column formats might be best to change to. Given I now have an icon I should think about creating a real banner as well.

WordPress 2.5 seems to have fixed the ability to input tables into the “visual” editor, as I was able to import the Inflation Table for March and it worked just fine this time. That is cool, because I always like putting tables in my posts.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

That is the sound of me blowing my foot off, but I learned something new today.

My RSS feed is now from my new Canadian Financial Opinions site, however, I set up my feedburner feed to use the RSS feed and not the straight feed. This meant all feeds were then cut to only TWO lines, and then users had to click to read the rest and it took them to the web site. Now this might be good, I don’t know, however I have had more than 1 unhappy reader complain, so I think I have remedied the situation, I hope.

Still lots to learn here, but I have a viable site map on my site and Google seems to traverse the site well, and as a bonus Yahoo and MSN are also wandering through it too!

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Well, Feedburner seems to imply that should be the case some time real soon, which is cool by me for either of my sites.

To do this, you simply go to the Feedburner site and go to the monetize tab and away you go. We shall see if this ads any sheckles to my pocketbook.

ShareThis

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.