The one letter that broke my blog

January 20, 2008 by
Filed under: General 

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.

Comments

5 Comments on The one letter that broke my blog

  1. Reno on Sun, 20th Jan 2008 1:56 pm

    2. 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.

  2. Binh Nguyen on Mon, 21st Jan 2008 6:36 am

    3. 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)

  3. Collin LaHay on Mon, 21st Jan 2008 1:20 pm

    4. 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.

  4. Nathan on Fri, 25th Jan 2008 10:30 pm

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

  5. BadManSports on Wed, 30th Jan 2008 11:28 pm

    6. 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?

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