Since launch, there’ve been several reported issues with RSS, which I’ve scrambled to try to fix before they did too much damage. But, we keep getting new requests, because the theme apparently doesn’t do a very good job of keeping track of the links, so here’s what’s wrong presently and what I’m working on to fix it.

• Individual author feeds polluted with whole-network posts – originally, we had installed a plugin that served the feed from /feed for the whole network, but it turns out that it was too greedy and it also grabbed every author’s /feed URL as well. Caching RSS feed sites like Feedburner and Feedly grabbed what was in those lists, and kept them. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about this but wait for those to expire.
• As a side effect of this, the theme’s expectation that the front page blog list should be accessible at http://the-orbit.net/feed/, and WordPress treating that like its own blog, means that feed is empty. The whole-network feed is actually at http://the-orbit.net/network-feed/ and it serves content from every blog. I will set up an .htaccess rule to seamlessly redirect the top level feed to the network-feed URL.
• Once I’ve done the above point, I can change the link in the header on the front page to /feed/, thus making it more apparent that that’s the RSS feed as the CSS that provides correct iconography only auto-senses that specific URL.
• An SEO plugin was installed to help with Facebook linking not grabbing appropriate featured images. That plugin expects all the authors’ feeds to be at /feed too. Fixing the previous point will fix the front page.
• Some browsers don’t even care about the auto-sense URLs, so putting a prominent RSS feed icon in the top bar of every blog would be preferable. I’ll be doing that as soon as possible, as soon as other fires are quenched.

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Photo by thewritingzone