The otherwise very fine Bloglines RSS aggregator isn’t liking this site very much, reporting errors when trying to add the Geekrant RSS feed which works so well for most other people.
Uh, yes the feed does exist. Those who like XML can look at it raw.
It’s doing the same for some other blogs, including my personal one, having rejected it since late December. Very odd. And I’m not the only one.
I’ve contacted Bloglines support, so hopefully they’ll be looking into it.
Before anything else, upgrade to WordPress 2 and check the permalinks.
For some reason, FeedValidator.org says “Temporary failure in name resolution” after pausing for almost a minute. Perhaps there are problems with the webhost’s DNS servers?
Yeah, I do plan upgrading to WordPress 2 at some stage. But I’m not doing it just because
– one aggregator fails (when all the others work) and I haven’t changed anything to cause it
– their support people haven’t got back to me to clarify the error, which is clearly incorrect (the feed exists. If the feed is invalid, by all means say so, don’t claim it doesn’t exist though)
– there’s no guarantee WP2 will solve it
The other issue is I don’t have a lot of spare time, and won’t go to WP2.0 until I’m confident it’s very stable and I don’t have to muck about with it a lot to keep it running. (Which by my usual rules means waiting for a couple of bugfix releases to go by before jumping in!)
With many thanks to Paul from Bloglines, who spotted this blog post, this has been resolved.
The error message above wasn’t very clear; in fact the Bloglines crawlers were getting a 403 Forbidden error. This is my fault, because a while ago I set up .htaccess to block a number of IP ranges because comment spammers and the like were stealing heaps of bandwidth. Evidently when Bloglines recently moved their servers, they got IP addresses in this range.
Mea culpa. My stuff-up.
Paul says they are working on making errors clearer. Thanks again Paul.