WordPress, Feedburner and sitemaps

If you use Feedburner for your wordpress feed, you probably use the FD Feedburner plugin for WordPress . The plugin is cool because it redirects your users to your Feedburner while letting Feedburner itself accessing your wordpress feed; and it’s really simple to configure.

But if you want to submit your feed to Google Webmaster Tools, Google will be redirected to your Feedburner too. While you may expect it to work, in some case it won’t. If you track clicks on Feedburner in fact, your feed will have changed links in it. Feedburner changes the <link>URL</link> to an internal URL that will redirect to your own URL after tracking stuff.

As a consequence, if you submit your feed as a sitemap on Google Webmaster Tools, Google will show you errors like this:

Feedburner and Google sitemap

This happens because the URLs in the Feedburner feed are not into your own domain but on http://feedproxy.google.com/

To fix this behaviour, easiest solution is having Google accessing your original feed (http://yourblog.tld/feed/) instead of being redirect to Feedburner. This can be easily done with a little change in the plugin.

Edit your plugin (with a text editor accessing the file via ftp, or just from the dashboard -> Plugins -> Editor, and select the FD Feedburner plugin) and look for this piece of code:

function feedburner_redirect() {
global $feed, $withcomments, $wp, $wpdb, $wp_version, $wp_db_version;

// Do nothing if not a feed
if (!is_feed()) return;

// Do nothing if feedburner is the user-agent
if (preg_match(‘/feedburner/i’, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) return;

// Do nothing if not configured
$options = get_option(‘fd_feedburner’);
if (!isset($options['feedburner_url'])) $options['feedburner_url'] = null;

Just change the line

if (preg_match(‘/feedburner/i’, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) return;

with:

if (preg_match(‘/(feedburner|google)/i’, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) return;

and you are done. Google won’t be redirected to your Feedburner feed, and it will use your original feed as sitemap.

Nice try

Derek Powazek – Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists. This is a kind of link baiting tactic i don’t like too much: the attack hook.

This is why, for once, i’m using a nofollow attribute.

Bigdump

Moving a website to a new hosting, i had the problem of importing the database. In fact, export was too much big (30Mb) compared to allowed size of upload files via phpmyadmin on new hosting (1Mb – where “M” maybe stands for “miserable”). Of course, no shell access…

So? Fortunately, i found BigDump, a GPL script that allows to import into the new database the exported file. Excellent!

Spam of the day

Just got yet another spam. But this one reminded me of a funny quote.

Email’s subject was: Millions of customers can’t be wrong! (and then usual stuff about penis enlargement bla bla bla ;) ).

Well, this is what immediately came in my mind:

(image from Cafepress)

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Wolda 2008

Hungary Logo Eulda 2007

This one is my favourite logo from Eulda 2007, European Logo Design Annual. Now, Eulda has gone global, becoming Wolda: Worldwide Logo Design Annual.

As you can see on Wolda website, you can submit your logo for Wolda ’08: any logo printed, published or visible online between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2007 is eligible.

Web Analytics Jokes

On 18th Dec 2007 Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics: an hour a day, wrote a post intitled Web Analytics Demistified.

On 7th Jan 2008 Eric T. Peterson, author of Web Analytics Demistified, wrote a post intitled Web Analytics: an hour a day.

23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

You must read 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies. Now.

Does YouTube sell links?

YouTube has PageRank 3: maybe YouTube is selling links. But if this is the case, i can see, right now, just one potential buyer

Wassup: the wordpress plugin for real time visitors tracking

Michele just launched Wassup, a nice WordPress plugin to get real time informations about your visitors. Give it a try!

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