Did Charlie Sheen Write This?

If you write a blog, you probably have a feed. Is your feed working for you? After my "Day 5" post, my feed quit working for me. I use Blogger, you may use Wordpress we all probably use Feedburner. A feed distributes your blog content, allows subscription to your content and emails your content. A feed is a must for any blog. When your feed goes on vacation--so do your readers!  

This is what happened to me. If you subscribe by email, you probably haven't noticed my Feedburner issues. Emails from this blog have been updated daily without issue.

My FEED has been another story. After my shameless blog post, "Day 5--Begging for Reviews", my feed stopped updating. I noticed the problem and I guess I hoped it would resolve itself. Fourteen posts later, my Google reader still displayed "Day 5..." as the newest content--embarrassing for a blogger who updates daily!

I went to my Feedburner account to assess the health of my Feed. In doing so, I noticed that I was losing subscribers. Unacceptable! I could wait no longer, I had to deal with this!

Could this be a simple fix? Of course not. First I ping'd my Feed--and it ping'ed successfully. I checked my FeedMedic and it assured me that I had a robust, bouncing baby feed on my hands. I had grabbed my blog subscription button from a third party website. I deleted it and put up a blogger subscription button instead--that didn't help!

Finally, I found a link in my Feedburner account page to test my Original Feed Validity. This link assessed my Feed and found some problems. It told me that some readers might have trouble with my Feed. Again, not acceptable. It listed some areas I needed to address. One said I had an unrecognized "namespace". What?

Having no idea what a "namespace" is, I did what any self-respecting blogger would do, I Googled it. The definition of "namespace" left me more confused! I think Charlie Sheen wrote it!

Here it is: "In general, a namespace is a container that provides context for the identifiers it holds, and allows the disambiguation of homonym identifiers residing in different namespaces."  Yes, that's English.

Now can you understand why my brain literally hurts when I mess with formatting, HTML, URL, Ping's, Feeds etc.? I'm not a webhead. I grew up with Atari, Commodore and our first home PC, Adam.

My choice today was to go to Internet College or start messing with stuff. I decided to start messing with stuff. I can't even tell you exactly what I did--but I took to my HTML with a club and hoped for the best. I tweaked and fiddled and crossed my fingers. I felt like a cave-woman banging on a radio. No clue how to make it work but I knew if I kept turning dials and pounding on it--it would submit to me.

And guess what? It did. I will never know what happened here today but I will say this...if I can do it, you can do it! Assess your feed, make sure it's working for you and if it's not--kick the crap out of it!

Jen
The Pet Washer