Because Young Mister Masher started me thinking about the main blog’s RSS feeds…<\/p>\n
And also because Young Mister Punctuation added further fuel to my thoughts…<\/p>\n
I have been thinking.<\/p>\n
Yeah I know.<\/p>\n
Dangerous.<\/p>\n
Anyway.<\/p>\n
The main blog generates a direct and an indirect feed.<\/p>\n
The direct feed is the generic \/blog\/?feed=rss2. The indirect feed is a Feedburner product.<\/p>\n
What happens with the indirect feed is that Feedburner sucks in the direct feed address (and all traffic on it) and spits it out via an indirect address of http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/.<\/p>\n
I ran the blog’s direct RSS feed through Feed Validator and it passed, but with two minors.<\/p>\n
Then I ran the blog’s indirect RSS feed through Feed Validator and it failed.<\/p>\n
Stone dead.<\/p>\n
What the?<\/p>\n
How?<\/p>\n
I scratched my head.<\/p>\n
How is it possible that a website feed can generate an acceptable RSS content, but when that feed is parsed through Feedburner it generates a fail?<\/p>\n
Anyway, I stopped scratching my head, fired up an FTP session and renamed the plugin folder, then ran the Feed Validator sessions again.<\/p>\n
The results for the direct feed came back with a pass and one minor.<\/p>\n
The results for the indirect feed came back with a big fat ‘F’ again.<\/p>\n
I reconnected the plugins folder and inspected the .php for each one, looking for rogue spaces outside the < and >.<\/p>\n
None found.<\/p>\n
Then I checked theme-functions.php looking for the same thing.<\/p>\n
None found.<\/p>\n
Then I checked theme-functions.php in the child theme I have running.<\/p>\n
None found.<\/p>\n
I switched themes to a native WordPress template and revalidated the RSS through Feed Validator.<\/p>\n
The directly generated theme came back with a big green tick and one minor.<\/p>\n
I pinged the indirectly generated theme through Feedburner, made myself a mug of hot chocolate and then revalidated the RSS for that one.<\/p>\n
This too came back with a big green tick and one minor.<\/p>\n
A theme problem, then?<\/p>\n
Seems likely.<\/p>\n
I changed the theme to a low-impact design I used for a year or so, checked the four plugins I use were good to go and revalidated the directly generated feed.<\/p>\n
Green. One minor.<\/p>\n
I pinged Feedburner and revalidated the indirectly generated feed.<\/p>\n
Green. One minor.<\/p>\n
(At this point I had a thought: I bet these changes will make Mister Masher’s Yahoo feed reader’s cup overfloweth)<\/p>\n
Anyway.<\/p>\n
I downloaded the current version of the Mantra theme (the one I use as my default design template), unzipped it, and uploaded it to the server.<\/p>\n
Then I switched the theme back to Mantra and ran the feed validations again.<\/p>\n
Both failed.<\/p>\n
This is pretty conclusive evidence that there’s a .php problem somewhere in the Mantra product.<\/p>\n
Although the problem doesn’t stop RSS publication through the direct feed, somehow it becomes a bigger issue when the direct feed is parsed through Feedburner – and stops the indirect feed from working.<\/p>\n
So when Young Mister Punctuation said his feeds had not been disrupted during the last server change, this was (probably) because he is subscribed to the directly generated feed. I need to check this.<\/p>\n
And when Young Mister Masher declared feed issues, the last time I did a server swap, it was (probably) because he was subscribed to the Feedburner feed. I need to check on this too.<\/p>\n
So, to wrap this up for now: I have switched the theme away from Mantra, to the one I validated both feeds successfully against about half an hour ago.<\/p>\n
I have switched the four plugins on.<\/p>\n
I have just run a final feed revalidation against both feeds and they both passed (with the same minor).<\/p>\n
I will start to debug the Mantra theme tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Oh, and I’m unconcerned with the minor that shows up.<\/p>\n
It’s the same one every time, and it is related to YouTube’s encoding of embedded content.<\/p>\n
So a big fat ‘meh’ to that one.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow I’ll debug.<\/p>\n
Tonight I’ll drink hot chocolate and watch an episode of Outnumbered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because Young Mister Masher started me thinking about the main blog’s RSS feeds… And also because Young Mister Punctuation added further fuel to my thoughts… I have been thinking. Yeah I know. Dangerous. Anyway. The main blog generates a direct and an indirect feed. The direct feed is the generic \u2026 Continue reading