Burst Blog

The modern world giveth, and the modern world taketh away. We clearly live in an era where the ubiquity of computers brings new experiences to a greater and broader base of people all over the world. Unfortunately, not all of these experiences are good ones. A disturbing new trend involves hacking feeds, and appending a thoroughly un-subtle collection of less-than-savory links to someone’s feed. Perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of this is that unless the blogger in question is looking at his or her feed output, this can go entirely unnoticed.   

So, yes - go ahead and look at your feed’s output. Now. 

If you spot the problem, my advice would be to start de-activating any plug-ins or add ons one at a time, and see if that changes the feed. (You’ll want to save any changes you make, and then refresh the page with which you’re viewing the feed each time. Yes, it is somewhat annoying - but so is getting hacked!) 

If that doesn’t rectify the situation, you’ll almost certainly want to talk to your blog platform’s support folks. If you’re an intrepid sole proprietor, responsible for all aspects of your blog and web hosting, well… you may have your work cut out for you. 

Did I mention that it’s always a good idea to make regular back-ups? If your blog gets so deeply hacked that you have to start fresh, you’ll be very glad you have backups. You’ll be equally sorry if you do not. 

While I’m talking about feeds, I would like to mention Feedvalidator, and specifically its use alongside Blogburst. When looking at your feed, there are a few methods by which you can have a gander at it. You can generally open it in a new browser window (and I think all browsers now will format it for you such that it doesn’t look like XML, but is readable) or you can use an RSS aggregator such as Google Reader. 

For general purposes (like seeing if the feed is broadcasting at all) either method is fine, but for discovering whether your feed is Blogburst-compatible or not, those methods are lacking a bit.   Browsers may or may not show you the full feed (Firefox seems to enjoy truncating the articles in its own way) and RSS readers are specifically built to digest the widest variety of feeds - feeds that can vary wildly in quality.

Google Reader in particular is incredibly forgiving and omnivorous in that regard - good for reading feeds of questionable quality, but very bad for diagnosing problems, as it masks problems - by design.  Blogburst syndicates feeds out to major publishing sites - so we really cannot afford to take in feeds that may not be well formed.

Blogburst is therefore rather unforgiving as RSS syndicators go; this is to prevent a feed of questionable structure from, say, taking down a major web site by displaying a malformed feed. (Believe me when I say that this scenario is very “exciting” in a bad, bad way.) 

Feedvalidator is a tool that’s just as strict as Blogburst is. If it passes muster at Feedvalidator, it is almost certain to work in Blogburst. It is very easy to use - pop your feed URL in the single text box, hit one button, and there you have it.  My favorite thing about Feedvalidator is that not only will it show you any problems that it finds, but it also will (via links, line by line!) give you suggestions as to how to fix the problems. 

Feedvalidator really is one-stop shopping for feeds, and I rely on it rather heavily. If your feed ever becomes problematic, I highly recommend Feedvalidator - it is very likely to show you the way to fix it. Give it a shot! I know you want to…