Testing

Testing the RSS feed…

Awhile back, my webhost did some upgrades to his server(s), and tried to also do some improvements. The best plans of geeks and men fell flat, and we wound up with some weird bugs. One of which was some busted permalinks. Next, I noticed that the hit count had gone down significantly. What this translates to is either I’m being more boring than usual (and thus my ego takes a bit of a punch) or what I’m writing isn’t getting out to the rest of the world.

Maire enters debug mode (and starts talking in the third person). Debug mode is annoying because it means I lose valuable knitting and vegging time to actually working, but things get done and despite my best efforts, I actually learn something useful (damnit).

Because my custom permalinks were pooched, I’d gone back to using the default permalink structure That means nothing to you, dear reader, but somehow it changed my RSS feed.  This DOES affect you, as you might be using something like Google Reader to get the heads-up that there’s a new post instead of checking my website every day. And that’s OK. I use Google Reader too. I love it. I became concerned when I didn’t see my own posts in it (and there have been a few in the past couple of weeks!).

I turned plugins off and on, and checked the web for help, and finally figured out that the website had changed a bunch of things all on its own and hadn’t told me about it. You’d think it had gained sentience and was playing coy.  It took about 2 hours, but I found the changes and have updated things, so hopefully this post (and possibly the last 2 weeks worth of posts) are now syndicating again.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I haven’t been avoiding you, Internet (and real life) Friends. My blog has been b0rked.

Just as an aside, I was considering giving my poor web host a break and just transferring everything to a pre-canned WordPress or Blogspot blog. Any thoughts on the matter? Also, if anyone is a self-hosted WordPress guru and has any idea why I might be having issues with permalinks, rss, etc – even after reinstalling WordPress – I’d sure love some feedback! I’m all about the tips & tricks, yo 😉