Yup, here I am, resurrecting this site and posting what I am learning about social media and such. I have managed to kill the RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which is at least ironic but very infuriating.
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 nothing was wrong on their end, so finally, I gave up and went to Google, tripping over the culprit.
WordPress Plug-ins can and do cause loading issues (slowing things down and such), so I finally came across one which had a straightforward 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 could see it all.
After slowly adding each plug, my guess on the culprit 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 now, I am enjoying having the RSS feedback for this site.
The moral of the story is: Don’t just keep adding Plugins to your WordPress configuration. Check them out, add them very slowly, and watch for any possible side effects (like if 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.
RSS Redux
Doesn’t matter anymore. RSS is really only used by newsletters and folks who read posts using Outlook or the like.
Hmmmm…. I ignore scrappers. What can one do?
I had a similar issue to this recently and I am also running sexy bookmarks but my RSS feed seems to have come back alive on its own! I’m not sure if I have had an update on it or not but I have updated my wordpress OS so that may have had an efect.
Something maybe worth looking into. I have also been looking for a CAPTCHA box of some description so thanks for sharing that one with us. I’ll be sure to have a look at it!
Simon
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