Scott McLeod has posted the details on Dangerously Irrelevant. Since I know most this blog’s readers are English teachers, I urge you to help out and post links to your blogs and your favorite English/Language Arts blogs on the Moving Forward wiki. Thank you to whoever it was who added my own blog, too!
Tag Archives: rss
Site Troubles
Thanks to the wonderful Ms. Place of one of my favorite blogs, Jane Austen’s World, I discovered that a plugin (WP Super Cache) I installed was wreaking havoc on my site. The problem is that I ignored one of Donncha’s directives — that fancy permalinks are a requirement for the plugin — so it’s my own fault; however, as I don’t really need the plugin (as far as I know, I’ve never had my site submitted to /. , Digg, or Reddit), I decided to just disable and delete. I wasn’t able to reproduce one error reported — that permalinks and archives were redirecting to the index page — and I suspect that is because I was logged in and was not seeing a Super Cached page. I think Ms. Place was seeing a Super Cached page that served up that error with permalinks (my fault for not listening to Donncha) because I don’t think she has commented here before, or at any rate, she has not commented regularly. In addition, my RSS feeds were broken, or at least were not updating properly, and when I left test comments, I was unable to see the published comment. I also use some plugins that Donncha explicitly said don’t play nicely with WP Super Cache, so what I have learned is to listen to Donncha!
If you are so inclined, I would appreciate it very much if you could test to see if you are having problems with any of the permalinks or archives, RSS feeds updating in your feed reader (if you subscribe), and commenting. Keep in mind comments are moderated based on the Spam Karma plugin. Your karma has to reach a certain level before they post automatically — some of you all are already there.
I apologize for the inconvenience. Also, those of you who follow me on my Feedburner feed, I am going to stop sending you my del.icio.us links now that I have an RSS feed for them in the sidebar. I hope this won’t be an inconvenience — it is possible to subscribe to my del.icio.us feed if you find them useful. I’m going to attempt to redirect my other feeds to my Feedburner feed — crossing my fingers that I don’t break my site. Again.
RSS Woes Continued
I think my RSS feed is fixed now. If you read my posts via RSS, you might want to visit the site to pick up what you missed. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Wonky RSS
I updated twice today, and I don’t see that my feeds have updated, so I’m hoping this post will let readers who keep up with this blog through RSS know that they should come by to read about e-mail subscriptions and manners in Jane Austen’s novels. Also, I wanted to test out my new e-mail notifier.
Subscribing
Update: You can now subscribe to receive posts via e-mail, but if you were previously subscribed, you will have to resubscribe using this new service.
I am sorry, but I am going to have to discontinue the option of subscribing to new posts via e-mail. Unfortunately, this plugin was causing 500 errors in my database, which those of you who are not technically inclined probably don’t care about. It looks as though the plugin requires a larger sleep time between queries than my host will allow, or at least that’s my suspicion, and because it isn’t feasible for me to change hosts right now, I will have to disable the plugin, which means if you subscribed to receive e-mails whenever I write a new post, you will no longer receive those e-mails. However, I would like to invite you to discover the joy that is RSS, if you haven’t already. If you click on my Subscribe link at the top, you will be able to subscribe to my RSS feed via your favorite feed reader. I suggest Google Reader, but I liked Bloglines well enough before I switched. In addition, you can get updates via MyYahoo or iGoogle.
Once again, I apologize for the inconvenience, and thanks for reading my blog.
Google Reader
I have been using Bloglines to keep up with my RSS feeds for as long as I can remember. I decided to play around with Google Reader today to see if I liked it better, and I have to say I liked it a lot better.
I like the way Google Reader enables me to click on a feed and see all the posts in that feed, even if I have already read them. In Bloglines, I had to go through an extra step (selecting from the drop-down menu next to “Display items with the last x”) to view feeds I had already read, and even then, I couldn’t figure out how to review just one feed instead of all the feeds in a folder, which I frankly didn’t want to do.
My feed subscriptions all imported properly in the folders where they were on Bloglines. Navigating was a snap. The look was pleasing to the eye — it seems like a small thing, but the display looked so much nicer. For example, pictures, embedded audio, embedded video, and the like all seemed to “behave” better in Google Reader. Subscribing to new feeds and organizing them into folders was easy. If I click on a feed to read the post on its blog, it opens in a new tab in Firefox. This is nice because in Bloglines I had to right-click (control-click) on the feed, select “Open in New Tab,” and then I could look at the feed. If I didn’t take this step and opened feeds in same window, then hit the back button to go back to Bloglines, I became confused about which feeds I had read already and often missed some I hadn’t read yet. I always found this very frustrating.
I like the shared and starred items features. The discover feature is nice, too. It’s fun to be able to keep up with how many subscribers follow a feed, and a new feature in Google Reader enables users to do this; however, in Bloglines, you can also see the names of the public subscribers, which was nice.
Check out this comparison of Bloglines Beta and Google Reader for more information. I should point out I was not using Bloglines Beta, but rather the older version of Bloglines. I think Bloglines Beta has more features. I’m not sure Bloglines compares as well with Google Reader as Bloglines Beta does.