Syndication problems
This past week I became involved with my blog’s syndication feeds. It all started from BlogShares, an online game simulating a stock market for blogs around the world. I have been playing ocasionally with buying and selling shares, and then noticed that my own blog’s rating (or value) has remained unchanged for quite some time. BlogShares wasn’t picking up new posts and new links, which intrigued me.
BlogShares uses Syndic8 to track blog changes. Syndic8 periodically checks all syndication feeds in its database for updates, including mine. I could see that Syndic8 spiders were happily accessing my blog’s feed every day, but they were unable to understand the content of the feed file. This problem started when I upgraded from WordPress 1.2.2 to 1.5.
What have I changed during the upgrade? Well, I had modified WordPress 1.2.2′s syndication feed filenames to be Google-friendly; instead of wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php, I renamed them to rss2.xml and atom.xml. Syndic8 spiders were accessing these feeds, people were subscribed to these feeds, everything was fine. But when I upgraded to WordPress 1.5, I no longer made the modifications so the new feeds were now wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php. To make the change invisible for old subscribers, I set up my webhost’s server to redirect requests on rss2.xml to wp-rss2.php, and requests on atom.xml to wp-atom.php. Easy, painless, working perfectly.
Well, not exactly perfectly. This redirect was the cause Syndic8′s spiders were unable to parse the feed. They were requesting rss2.xml, were receiving the redirect to wp-rss2.php, were downloading the actual feed, but couldn’t understand it because of a parsing bug. The spiders didn’t ignore the redirect message and considered it a part of the feed, which was syntactically wrong.
After exchanging a few messages with Syndic8 guys and identifying the problem, the old syndication feed address on my blog was marked as “dead and redirected” in their database, and the new feed was submitted. It will take a few days until the blog gets indexed again, and at that time I expect my blog’s shares to make a nice jump up in value. Buy some of the available shares while you still can!
