Archive for the 'Blog' Category

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.

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)

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!

Setting up

Setting up this brand new blog and i’m already having some problem. Nice…

First update: it looks like you have to have at least one post on your post before you can use Feedburner (btw, i’m using this plugin to manage feed stuff), because an empty feed returns a 404 error, even though the feed is there.

Second update: switched to a widgetized theme, because widgets rock.

Third update: of course, i’m using dofollow, a plugin that remove rel=”nofollow” from links in comments. Why would I want nofollow on moderate comments?

Fourth update: and since i’m a lazy ass and i don’t want to play with css to display links better than the theme does, i’m using Link Indication, that does even more.

Fifth update: social bookmarks come with Bookmark Widget.