Some of you may have experienced a rather annoying volume of theme test posts in your RSS Reader yesterday. My apologies if that was the case.
If you have no idea what I’m even talking about then you can completely ignore this post too :-)
Ironically in an effort to improve visitor experience to the blog website, it was migrated from a Windows Host to a Linux host over the weekend but clearly with a few teething problems.
The Technical Stuff Bloggers May Find Interesting
I sometimes use Windows Live Writer to author blog posts. I find it to be a fantastic blog authoring utility however on this occasion it unfortunately did not want to play nice in the new environment. The test posts should have been automatically and immediately removed but this was not the case for some reason.
If you’re quick about it though, you can delete the posts in WordPress before FeedBurner publishes them to an RSS Feed. By the time I had discovered there was a problem however, it was already too late.
Having deleted the posts in WordPress, the next step is to resync the RSS Feed in FeedBurner under the Troubleshootize menu. Doing so fixes the original RSS feed but of course Goolgle being the clever folks that they are choose to cache rss feeds on their side. So even though the offending posts no longer exist in the actual RSS Feed, they will still appear in Google Reader.
Now there is a sort of work around to this, involving the create of posts with the same GUIDs, a WordPress hack and then modifying the posts to have an old publication date, thereby forcing it to the very end of a feed. To be honest, that’s too much like hard work for a busy DBA and so instead I’d rather beg for forgiveness and move on :-)
Here’s how it can be done though for those that may be interested:
