I was hoping the move to this new location to be a smooth one. Everything appeared to be going well but a couple of things have come up.
My feed won’t validate. I’m not bright enough to figure out how to fix this? Any feedgeeks willing to help?
My subscribers went from 156 to 349 in one day. Now it would be nice to think that my brilliant posts could potentially increase readership by over 100% but I’m suspect. Not sure what’s happening but something seems fishy. Now it would be nice to think that my brilliant posts could potentially increase readership by over 100% but I’m suspect. Not sure what’s happening but something seems fishy.
So if anyone cares to comment or offer advice on this one, please do so.
Entries (RSS)
April 11th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Sorry I didn’t get back to you via e-mail the other day, Dean. The small boy is taking up a great deal of our time and energy these days - in a really good way, of course.
I took a look at your feed and I see that you are using the PodPress plugin. I wonder if that is adding some funky stuff to your feed? I’m not sure if the iTunes compliant elements of the feed are compliant with the true RSS2.0 standards.
April 11th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Hey Dean,
The FeedBurner feed you’ve got there seems to have two separate issues:
1) The validity problem is a recent one that isn’t your fault; the WFW group who publish the spec for the tag recently changed their namespace, it seems: http://wellformedweb.org/news/wfw_namespace_elements. feedvalidator.org seems to complain about this change while the W3C feed validator does not. However, I’d consider updating your feed’s existing “wfw:commentsRSS” elements to go with the new capitalization shown above.
2) I believe your subscription change can only be explained by the addition of Bloglines polling results; it appears they were not polling your feed for updates for the prior 30 days, but got back into the pool as of yesterday’s numbers. Either that or the number they were reporting on your behalf was much lower until yesterday. Unfortunately, we do not current keep a history of your readership breakdown (it’s on the list) so it’s difficult to verify the exact cause of the jump, but this is my likely guess.
I hope these answers help. Feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.
~Matt
April 11th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Matt,
In regards to your suggestion of updating the “wfw;commentsRSS” element, I’m not sure where I’d find it. I would guess it would be in the comment.php page but I couldn’t seem to find it there. Could it be elsewhere?
Thanks for your help.
Dean
April 11th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Depending on the feed version that WordPress provides that you’re using as the FeedBurner source — Atom 0.3, RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0 — I think the template you should be looking to modify is either wp-atom.php, wp-rss.php, or wp-rss2.php. These are all located in the root directory of a standard WordPress 1.5 installation, at least.
April 11th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Oops — I of course forgot that is only found in RSS 2.0 feeds in WordPress, so wp-rss2.php should be the file in question.
April 11th, 2006 at 11:36 pm
So Matt, here’s the part in my rss2.php file reference:
wfw:commentRSS php echo comments_rss
wfw:commentRSS php rss_enclosure
Are you suggesting changing the wfw:commentRSS to wfw:commentRss?