I’m guessing most of you will have an RSS feed for your blog. Who wouldn’t you want one? If you're a Typepad user, then a feed comes as standard. RSS feeds are a simple, effective way for your readers to follow your blog without having to check for updates – and for you to see how many people are subscribing. (Not to mention the warm glow of satisfaction as you watch your subscription numbers moving up.)
But feeds don’t just take care of themselves. It is possible to damage or even break your feed – which means that people will stop getting your updates or find themselves unable to ‘grab your feed’ when they first stop by your site.
A healthy feed is a vital part of a healthy blog. And taking care of your feed is part of good blog housekeeping. Which means you really need to know how to:
- keep an eye on your feed
- take emergency action if things go wrong
- avoid problems in the first place
Keeping an eye on your feed
One simple thing you can do is read your own feed. Set it up in a feedreader or follow it with a live bookmark (if you’re using Mozilla). Even if you’re not reading feeds to keep up with other blogs you can use a reader to keep an eye on how your posts look, to make sure there aren’t any glitches in the way photos or video embeds are working, and to check new posts are showing up. (If you’re really keen you can follow Mike Sansone’s advice and follow your feed in a number of different readers…)
If you’re using Feedburner you can also check in to the ‘feedmedic’ alert on your feed. You get there from the troubleshootize page on your account (you can see what the tab looks like from this picture).
Hopefully it’ll give you a green ‘all clear’.
Taking emergency action
Don’t panic if you notice a problem with your feed – or if someone else gets in touch to let you know it’s not working. The message you receive might be initially perplexing – like this one a client of Claire’s reported recently
Hi Claire
Someone emailed to say that when they tried to grab my feed they got this message:“Internet Explorer cannot display this feed. This feed contains code errors. Go back to the previous page.”
It works fine for me in Firefox, but when I try grabbing it in IE, it tries to download a word doc. Can you help me with this please?
Claire was able to identify the source of the problem by going to Feedburner and the troubleshootize page. This is the message she got from the feedmedic:
“It appears that you have used a Microsoft Office tool to edit your post. This can cause problems. See http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=593 for the solution to this problem.”
To pinpoint the problem post she ran the code through feedvalidator (you can get there from the troubleshootize page) and this is what came up…
Okay, it might look scary, but once you know which post is causing the problem it's just a question of stripping out the formatting that's doing the damage.
Here’s the “how to” from Claire:
To fix it,
- go into the post, highlight the copy and paste it into a Notepad doc.
(Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad.)
- Delete the copy you have just copied from the post. Click on the Edit HTML tab (to the right of the Compose Post tab) and check that it is totally empty.
- Now select and copy the text you just pasted into Notepad.
- Then click on the Compose Post tab again and paste the copy back in.
Save it.
That will fix the problem.
Avoiding problems in the first place
If you don’t fancy the sound of all that... make sure you're taking preventive action to avoid damaging your feed in the first place. The root cause of the problem here was pasting material direct from Word to Typepad. To get round this just add one simple step to your posting routine. Make sure you paste your material from Word (or a webpage) to notepad before you cut and paste it again onto Typepad. It cleans out any formatting glitches. (Claire's blogged about this before here.)
(Another option is to post direct to Typepad – but if you’re going to do this make sure you’ve changed your preferences to save as draft and get into the habit of saving as you go along.)
One last piece of health advice: make sure you’re using your wonderful feed to best effect. Include a call to action like subscribe to this feed (with the link of course!) at the foot of each post. Then watch your subscriber numbers climb…
Joanna Young is part of the Blog Angel Team here at Business Blog Angel. She's also a writing coach, a client of Claire's and a self-confessed blogging addict.
You can read more of her work at the Confident Writing blog. This month she's focusing on writing to make a powerful connection. Perfect for bloggers!
