A few days ago I noticed that my Feedburner feed was not updating so I began the long, confusing journey to find out why and fix it.
Easier said than done. On my journey, I discovered from the Troubleshooting option at Feedburner.com that there was a problem with my original feed at Feedburner that I needed to fix in addition to a 404 error. Of course, the exact "problem" of my original feed was not disclosed. So I decided to paste this original URL in a browser and was quite perplexed by what I found. My original feed URL was automatically redirecting to another site that was not mine. How did I know it wasn't mine? It was in Chinese and I don't speak Chinese. I found it even more perplexing that the URL of this redirected feed was MY URL yet the feed was obviously not mine.
I continued on my journey by trying to determine exactly where this problem originated from. Was it my web server? No, they said it was not. Was it WordPress? I have no idea because I didn't get any response to my posting on their forum. Was it Feedburner? Again, I have no idea because no one answered me on that forum either. It was somewhat comforting to read that others have had similar problems (although I didn't read about anyone else's feed linking to a Chinese blog). WordPress did indeed have postings from others with the same issue that were resolved usually by uninstalling a plugin which was causing the problem. But, alas, I wasn't using any of the same plugins that seemed to be the culprit for others. However, I did follow their suggestions and uninstalled each of my plugins to see if perhaps they were causing my issues. They weren't.
Tonight I decided to try again to see if anything made sense. To my pleasant surprise, my original feed URL was no longer redirecting to the Chinese blog. As I did absolutely nothing since the last time I checked, perhaps this was some sort of divine intervention? Who knows, I am just grateful that I don't have to learn Chinese.
I read through many more forums, tried to ping my feed several times, uninstalled and reinstalled my plugins yet again and still nothing. As there was nothing else I could think of trying, I went back to work. Several hours later, I decided to give it another try. I repinged with success. I confirmed that the redirection to the Chinese blog was still gone and tried unsuccessfully again to resync my feed. I received the same error message I have been receiving all along with the resync option in Feedburner.
Just for the heck of it, I checked out both my original and my feed URL and guess what? Both feeds are now updated even though I am still getting the error message when trying to resync.
I have absolutely no idea why my feeds are all of a sudden working and can't help but wonder what I might find tomorrow.
The morale of the story? Beats me but maybe I should consider calling Ghost Busters as there are times I am convinced there is a Poltergeist living inside my computer!
You don’t have to be the originator or all the content you provide to your target market. YES original content is important so you should definitely provide as much original content as you have. However, there are many other ways to help establish yourself as your industry expert. How?
