Keep Yourself Updated
I recently ran into a problem. My RSS for this blog and my other blog, Ikigai | Blogging the Martial Way, just randomly stopped working. But here’s the catch – the malfunction was selective in its scope!
Subscribers to either didn’t notice any problems. The feeds kept pulling properly. Aggregator sites, however, ran into a complete brick wall. Every single one encountered a pulling error and none of my articles were showing up (not even old ones). What a mess!
The first thing I tried to do was narrow down the problem. In order to do that, I used FeedBurner’s very valuable Feed Validation Tool. To use the validator, simply type in the url of your desired feed and let it process the code. After it’s finished, the Validator will do its best to inform you where it encountered the problem. Of course, as coding tends to do, sometimes the problem isn’t located at the spot validator indicates. But a keen programmer can pick that up and really narrow down the issue.
After consulting with some smart tech brains at my company, I realized the problem was quite simple – I hadn’t updated my wordpress plugins! That’s right, one of my plugins was old and not completely compatible with the new wordpress. This caused a slight discprepency in the feed, and as programmers will tell you, even a slight discrepency can disrupt the whole operation.
I realized then that it is imperative to keep up with your application updates. This can be seen as a universal truth across your whole computer. It may take a minute or two now, but it’ll save you potentially hours of headaches later on.
