The Blog Works

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It is very easy to look at your blog and see that everything seems normal, but underneath the surface problems might be lurking. When was the last time you checked that everything actually works as it should?

To give an example, I have a number of older blogs that use Blogger.com. Yesyerday I was setting up an RSS feed reader on the host site, Beth Tephillah Ministry Centre, of one of these blogs - Mal’s Meanderings. In order to obtain the feed URL I right-clicked on the RSS icon and copied the shortcut, as one does. I pasted this into the code where I was working and discovered that it did not work.

So, back into the blog template to see what was wrong. You guessed it - the feed URL being produced by the Blogger template code was incorrect. The code looked fine, but gave the wrong result. This had me mystified for a while, until I remembered that this blog was started on the old Blogger and later upgraded into the new Blogger. On checking the help system for the new Blogger I discovered there are now different ways of doing RSS feeds.

It seems pretty poor to me that upgrading should have broken code that used to work fine, with no warnings or error messages, just a wrong feed URL.

It also became clear why I have had no subscribers to that feed - it didn’t work! Apologies to anyone who tried.

Which brings me to the point of this post - how long since you checked all of the links on your site? It isn’t just about the possibility that things might have changed over time and no longer work properly. What about links to other sites that no longer exist, or worse, might now go to somewhere that you would not link to in your wildest dreams?