20
Jan

The one letter that broke my blog

Posted in Blogging> General> Off-Topic

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get your blog updates by email. Thanks for visiting!

Back when I wrote the post on protecting yourself from content theft, I made a little itsy bitsy typo. I added an extra “>” to the code which ultimately broke my RSS feed. Thanks to an email I received I have fixed the problem. This inspired me to write a post making sure you validate your RSS feed every once in awhile.

Go to FeedValidator.org and make sure your RSS feed / feedburner link are validated properly, or you may be losing visitors. I had no idea my RSS was broken because it was still displaying properly for about 40% of the people, but I was losing 60% of my subscribers. By simply removing one little “>” I doubled my RSS traffic.

To help patch up the damages, I will be deleting my last two posts and republishing them so that they are listed properly on all RSS feeds. If you are one of the 40% who has a working RSS feed of my blog, you may end up seeing double posts.

Share This: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Mixx

RSS feed | Trackback URI

5 Comments »

Comment by Reno
2008-01-20 13:56:38

Rest assured, Reno is still subscribed. Last night I could not view your posts through Wizz RSS for Firefox. Everything looks good now and I can see your feed again. By the way, I like the new theme.

 
Comment by Binh Nguyen
2008-01-21 06:36:05

Hmm… that “>” deserve a blog post for it?

Just a crap comment to say that “>” is a character, NOT A LETTER.

A letter is a-z A-Z ;)

Don’t trust me? here is a definition:

“A graphic character that is in the alphabet of a natural language.”
(Source:www.eki.ee/itstandard/2000/def_en.shtml)

Comment by Collin LaHay
2008-01-21 13:20:51

You are correct, but I decided not to edit the title of the post because it would make some links redirect to “not found” pages.

 
 
Comment by Nathan
2008-01-25 22:30:57

Oh come on… He was just making a point to double check.

 
Comment by BadManSports Subscribed to comments via email
2008-01-30 23:28:42

My feed seems fine but FeedValidator doesn’t like the way I have some videos embedded.

Could this be the reason why Mashable tells me that no feeds exist on my site?

 
Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI
Subscribe to comments via email
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.
New Poker Affiliate



Recent Posts

Recent Viewers

Tag Cloud


  Website Marketing Strategies by Collin LaHay © 2008, Mixed Market Arts