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One Character and Entire RSS Feed Dead

Back in 2010, my Feedburner RSS feed was dead. Which meant I was missing my 1000-per-day hits there for Google (so a very bad thing). I only realized that this was dead at the end of the first day, and then madly tried to figure out why there were no hits. Feedburner is now extinct, as an RSS collector.

At first, I thought it was due to me cleaning up my Google accounts, and maybe I had turned off my Feedburner access, but that turned out to be only a Red Herring. Feedburner was working fine, however, it did lead me to their Feed verification program.

I ran the feed verification and it BARFED at a specific line in Here Comes 2011 a post I did on Thursday (on my Mac). The error output was a little cryptic, but it seemed there was a character it didn’t like, so after I had backed up the HTML for the post in Notepad, I started removing characters, but nothing seemed to fix the issue. I finally lost my patience and deleted the entire post contents, and then the Feed went back to normal.

From this I figured that something in the post was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. This morning I remembered that I was experimenting with an Old Mac a friend had given me and tried to write a post on it, and for some reason, this may well have inserted an odd character, and sure enough, I found it, after looking closely at the Notepad backup that I had. I have no idea what keystroke combinations on the mac created this, but after removing the bad character, I ran the Feedburner Feed Tester and it passed with no problem, so my RSS feed is now back up and alive.

Social Media

Other than that, I am finding Social media stuff helps, but it is a slow process. My Twitter and Digg readership slowly increases and I have not posted my own stuff onto Stumbleupon for over a week, so those goals are being met, but there does not seem to be a magic bullet for increasing readership (and thus revenues) just yet. Maybe there is a Tipping Point here that once I cross things will get better, who knows?

2 thoughts on “One Character and Entire RSS Feed Dead”

  1. Hi BCM. #Ypromogroup is new, but it’s picking up steam. 🙂 we only started using it about 2 weeks ago and letting everyone know about it now. Don’t worry we’ll promote the hell out of you when you use it. Already, one #ypromogroup link was the top of Tip’d for the day due to our efforts. 😉

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