Feedburner RSS feed updated + server optimization tip

Well, it appears that the last thing to get updated was the Feedburner feed. Although the cutover from Typepad to WordPress was smooth, with only a few minutes interruption in service, apparently the DNS changes didn’t propagate fully enough to satisfy Feedburner.

If you ever get messages like “The domain does not seem to exist” or “There was a problem retrieving the feed: java.net.UnknownHostException” a possible cause is DNS propagation (I surmise). Feedburner’s help recommends pinging, resynching, validating your feed, and so on, but for me, all it took was a little time — roughly 18 hours.

Which reminds me, I recently wrote an interesting piece on server optimization, specifically preparing for and responding to high traffic. Doing research for that article, I was shocked to find out what a drain on bandwidth and server resources an RSS feed can be. I ran across a large number of cases where it was estimated that anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the load and bandwidth was due to the constantly polling feed aggregators. Offloading your feeds to a service like Feedburner, or even to another hosting account or server, can have a noticeable impact. I’ll review some other tips that I ran across in the coming week or two.

Thanks for your patience during cutover, and thanks to John and RJ for helping test out the feeds.

Blog Ported from TypePad to WordPress

If you hadn’t noticed, I ported the blog from TypePad to WordPress over the weekend. I’ve been a WordPress user for a long time, but have been avoiding making this move. It’s not that I had so much content that it would be unbearable, just that I didn’t feel like the hassle. But it was time for a change.

I was expecting quite a few more hiccups during the migration, but it went rather smoothly all-in-all. There were some incompatibilities that had to be cleaned up, and the inevitable theme tweaking, but I’d much prefer to tweak with full control than hack without it! The biggest headaches were rereferencing the images and redirecting the old URL’s.

I’ll write up the experience step-by-step as soon as I verify that everything is working as expected. If you have any problems, or notice and irregularities, broken links, missing images, etc., please post a comment here.

Some things that I expect will need a little more TLC:

• Page formatting, e.g. line breaks where there shouldn’t be, sizing issues. (due to some hacks I used at Typepad)
• CSS formatting inconsistencies (hacks again)
• A few broken internal links; I think I caught all of the external links, but it’ll take a manual review to make sure I haven’t missed any of the internal ones
• A few hours to one day feed problems. Right now, FeedBurner doesn’t recognize the domain, so until the DNS changes propogate fully, the feed will appear to be down.

Old and new screen captures:

Format Change

I’ve gathered some informal feedback and have decided to alter slightly the content of my posts. In general, the detailed, specific posts are found by readers via Google — and many of those readers never return. The more generalized or basic posts are of interest to a broader cross section of regular readers and searchers.

For the most part, I avoid these general posts because I assume that they’ve already been written about ad nauseam — apparently this is a bad assumption. So expect coverage to be focused on the same types of topics, but also expect the average level of complexity to decrease somewhat.

If I’m missing the mark, or if you don’t agree, let me hear about it.

Rumors of my death. . .

“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” But I am working on something pretty special.

Two to three more months before an announcement, but if anyone is interested in doing some alpha testing, please let me know. Web site and mobile phone testing (Nokia Series 60 and Sony-Ericsson Platform 5 and above for now). There’s some schwag and a few other service perks involved.

And in honor of the holidays, here are the lyrics to one of my favorite holiday songs:

You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch.
You really are a heel.
You’re as cuddly as a cactus,
You’re as charming as an eel.
Mr. Grinch.

You’re a bad banana
With a greasy black peel.

You’re a monster, Mr. Grinch.
Your heart’s an empty hole.
Your brain is full of spiders,
You’ve got garlic in your soul.
Mr. Grinch.

I wouldn’t touch you, with a
thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.

You’re a vile one, Mr. Grinch.
You have termites in your smile.
You have all the tender sweetness
Of a seasick crocodile.
Mr. Grinch.

Given the choice between the two of you
I’d take the seasick crockodile.

You’re a foul one, Mr. Grinch.
You’re a nasty, wasty skunk.
Your heart is full of unwashed socks
Your soul is full of gunk.
Mr. Grinch.

The three words that best describe you,
are, and I quote: “Stink. Stank. Stunk.”

You’re a rotter, Mr. Grinch.
You’re the king of sinful sots.
Your heart’s a dead tomato splot
With moldy purple spots,
Mr. Grinch.

Your soul is an apalling dump heap overflowing
with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable
rubbish imaginable,
Mangled up in tangled up knots.

You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch.
With a nauseaus super-naus.
You’re a crooked jerky jockey
And you drive a crooked horse.
Mr. Grinch.

You’re a three decker saurkraut and toadstool
sandwich
With arsenic sauce.

“You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” ~ Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss). Pronounced “soyce,” btw.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Feed Updated

Just got back from holiday, and had a note waiting for me regarding feed status. Appears that one of the feeds has not been updating recently. I made a few changes, but I’m not sure if they’ll resolve the problem.

If you saw sporadic posts prior to my holiday, rather than daily updates, you might want to try unsubscribing and resubscribing to the feed.

On Holiday

Out on holiday until 27-April.

New Blog, Not New to Blogging

"Yay, yet another blog." Not to worry, I’m saving CPU cycles here. In a slight breach of blogging etiquette, it is unlikely that this blog will be tightly focused.

I’m cleaning house and aggregating blogs a bit here, so posts will cover a relatively wide spectrum, but the primary focus will be on programming, mobile applications and development, and interesting news items.