I’ve made a few site updates and learned some things in the process, so it seemed like a bit of sharing was in order.
First, you’ll now see "Print this" at the top of each article. The print capability is made possible by the WP-Print WordPress plugin developed by Lester Chan. It does a really nice job of formatting posts for printing, and has three configuration options that let you choose whether or not to include comments, images, and a list of all links referenced in the article. I looked at several other options before choosing this one, and I’m very satisfied with it. I use it personally when I’m writing a new article based on some previous content, since I find it easier to work from a printed version — especially in the case of some of my longer articles. If you’re a WordPress blogger and you want to provide your readers with print options, check out Chan’s plugin page where there are several versions you can download.
Second, I’ve changed content in the far right side for my Flickr photos, so that you can now choose to view the photographs as slideshows like you could before, or can also view the related Flickr page as a complete collection. It occurred to me that some folks might not care for the slideshows, so this was a good way to link to the photo pages by collection rather than always defaulting to slideshows.
Finally, as my friend Audee notes in her comment on my article about Zoo Atlanta, I’m now sending my site through FeedBurner and have incorporated various "feed flares" at the bottom of each article. You can also now subscribe to my feed by e-mail, and subscribe to posts and comments. I’m still experimenting with some of the flares as well as the advertising, so different elements may come and go as I check out some of the sites I’m now encouraging people to submit my articles to.
I did discover, unfortunately, that there is a known issue using FeedBurner with Yahoo! web hosting. Attempts to use my old feed URL, which was:
http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/feed
should automatically redirect to the new FeedBurner URL:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/afewgoodpens
but it doesn’t, and displays a "document has moved" error which points to the old feed URL (going nowhere, therefore). As you can see from the description of the problem on the FeedBurner forum, there is no solution available yet. I found that this meant two things for my site.
First, if anyone was subscribing to my feed with the original URL, it would no longer work. If you’re one of my subscribers, and that happened to you … my apologies. Had I realized this was happening, I would have posted something announcing the change first.
Second, my account on services like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog needed to be updated. MyBlogLog uses the feed URL to fetch new posts to display on its site, so I had to update my account to point to the FeedBurner URL. Easy.
Blogcatalog, however, uses RSS autodiscovery to locate a site’s feed, and that was a bit of a problem since autodiscovery tried to use the old feed URL — which should have redirected to FeedBurner but did not. I don’t really understand how all this works, but I’ve concluded that the WordPress code normally handles the redirect, yet something about Yahoo’s hosting prevents that from working normally. I ended out adapting the RSS autodiscovery tips and modifying WordPress’s header.php file with the FeedBurner URL hardcoded. Hardcoding like this is never the best solution, but it will hold me up until a permanent fix becomes available. In any case, it appears to have worked; my account page on Blogcatalog was reporting an error finding my feed, but has since updated to show a successful discovery and also shows the FeedBurner URL as the feed URL.
Got a headache yet? I do … this stuff never seems to just fall into place quite right, does it?
I’m a little disappointed that this is another quirk I’ve run into that’s specific to Yahoo! web hosting and their WordPress implementation. While I have to be fair and say that I’ve never had a problem with my site or its availability at Yahoo!, site performance and availability is but a minimum requirement for a web host these days. In my opinion, Yahoo! oversold their hosting service to newbie WordPress bloggers like myself by making it so easily available, by implying that they would update the WordPress installation but never doing it, and by nearly running from the room screaming if you call their support line and even use "WordPress" in a sentence. They could have a kick-ass blog hosting service, if they’d just make an effort to actually support WordPress users — something that might even make then unique in the industry. Are you listening, Yahoo!? Call me, let’s talk about it….
Oh, well, enough about that … the weekend’s here and Atlanta weather is supposed to be sunny with temperatures in the 60s … what could be better than that?