RJ Martino's Web Log » Monetize Blog

Feedburner, WordPress, and the RSS Feed

rjmartino — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:43:11 +0000

Audio File for Feedburner, WordPress, and the RSS Feed
(1 minutes 37 seconds)
080912-feedburner-wordpress-rss.mp3

I’ve been a long time fan of Feedburner. But one day, my feed magically broke. I recreated the feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/RjMartinosWebLog) and pointed it (rjmartino.com/wp-rss2.php).

Then, as I started creating new posts, I realized that nothing was being sent to feedburner. When I viewed my feedburner page, it was BLANK. When I logged into Blogline, my feed was blank.

I checked the Original Feed Validity. It checked out just fine…

I checked the FeedBurner Feed Validity. It checked out just fine.

I even re-synced… nothing.

I searched forums and found a guy named Rajasekharan at http://www.mtherald.com. Rajasekharan had fixed the same problem but he didn’t list the fix. So I visited his medical transcription blog, found his email address, and shot him an email.

He was really helpful. He explained that when he setup his feedburner feed, he gave the URL of his original feed (ie http://mtherald.com/blog/wp-rss.php). As he later found out, that was the blunder.

After changing the RSS feed to the correct URL, http://mtherald.com/?feed=rss2. It was solved.

I did the exact same thing. I set feedburner to look at http://wwww.rjmartino.com/wp-rss.php. The feed should have been set to http://www.rjmartino.com/?feed=rss2.

After changing the setting, I “pinged” the page using http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/ping, and a few minutes later, my feeds showed back up!

Post 2 – Monetize Your Blog

rjmartino — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:45:44 +0000

From Feb 7, 2007 until February 13, 2007 – 8.5 Hours
So, as some of you have seen, I’ve registered www.RJMartino.com and moved my blog to a different server. One thing that I’ve done is registered the name for 10 years. Search engines recognize this as a more “permanent” web site. This helps with “natural” search engine ranking. Registering and Setting up the domain was the easy part.

After the domain name was setup and the server was configured, I spent 8.5 hours moving the files and the database over to the new server. I also upgraded to the latest version of wordpress and upgraded all of my plug-ins.

Currently I’m using the following plug-ins:

Akismet - SPAM control
Feedburner Feed Replacement – Help users find the RSS feed
Related Posts – posts related posts at the end of each post
Text Link Ads – to publish ads from text-link-ads.com… CLICK THIS LINK IF YOU WANT TO USE TEXT LINKS
WP-ShortStat – to view short statistics on my blog

After the upgrade my permalinks didn’t work correctly. I found out it was because the .htaccess wasn’t moved correctly. I removed my old SPAM control plug-in (it wouldn’t work with WordPress 2.1) and started using Akismet. From the articles I’ve read, it seems pretty sophisticated.

And lastly, I’ve removed my photo gallery (Gallery2 is what I was using). I’ve decided that I’ll start using flickr. I was a flickr user back when it wasn’t cool to be a flickr user.

This is another article in the “Monetize Your Blog” category and although we haven’t done a lot to make more money (we have only inserted an affiliate link for Text Link Ads) we are now up-to-date with our software and we can use the latest plug-ins with no problem.

We’ve also registered the domain name to increase visibility and awareness. And we’ve moved to a more stable server.

Any technical project requires a stable infrastructure… and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stabalized our infrastructure. After 8.5 hours, we have a stable infrastructure.

Post 1 – Monetize Your Blog

rjmartino — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:11:52 +0000

I’ve been making changes to my blog for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons is because I’m going to try and monetize the blog. Currently it doesn’t make any money, not directly. I hope that some of my “technical” articles have resulted in new service contracts for iProv, but either way, I haven’t personally seen a check for this site.

I’m going to keep everything public and feel free to ask any questions, I’ve making RSS feeds more visible. I’ve always been a big advocate of RSS feeds but I’ve never really “advertised” the ability.

I’ve also added the ability to leave a donation via paypal… really… EVERYTHING HELPS… It takes time to write a blog and I’m hoping my blog isn’t going to be so much of a “journal” but more about information and a knowledge base. Just click on the page that says “Donate to RJsWeblog”

I’ve added Google Adsense to show advertising to my main links. I will get a small royalty each time the link is clicked… SO CLICK THEM.

I’ve added “Recommended Amazon Stuff” so that if you order from that link, I’ll make a small referral fee. Yeah, small. But I get to choose what is “recommended.”

And lastly, I’ve added text-ad-links.com to the right hand side, these ads will also be published in the RSS feed as soon as I do the WordPress upgrade. I recieved $100 in free advertising just for signing up as publisher as well

I’ve reorganized some of my link categories too. I like to think I’ve organized them in order of interest.

I’ve got a list of other changes I’m going to make but I’m only spending about 2 hours a week on making the changes. The other time is going toward writing and my “real job.”

I’ll try to keep track of how much time I take as well.

Hopefully this weekend, I’ll upgrade from WordPress 1.5.2 to WordPress 2.1. Wish me luck.