Mastering Digital Arts for Web, Video, Mobile, IoT (and Space Travel)
RSS feeds continue to be quite popular among audiences striving to keep up with the information overload in a more or less organized manner. Since RSS feeds don’t report their subscribers’ activity, if you happen to run a content management system you may have RSS subscribers you know nothing about. It’s time…
If your WordPress feeds don’t seem to be updating but remain “stuck” in the past (this can happen particularly after a migration of a site to a new server), enter this snippet into the functions.php file of your theme in WordPress:
add_filter('wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', create_function('', 'return 60;'));
Once this is in place, visit your feed URL in a web browser, then wait (literally) a minute for your RSS feed to update and it should begin working normally.
Once you have confirmed that the feed is working, comment out the above line in order to return to the default 12 hours update cycle or replace the value of 60 seconds with something more reasonable so as not to overburden your server with RSS updates.
Having trouble with Feedburner? Ocassionally, the MyBrand feature may be giving you a 404 error. The good news: there is an easy fix. And if it does not work, we show you what you need to do.
MyBrand allows you to use your own domain name in your feed’s URI while still collecting Feedburner stats. This is extremely important: should you ever want to or have to quit using Feedburner, your subscribers are all yours. Without MyBrand, you can’t even switch to another feed delivery service because you would loose all your subscribers. With MyBrand, this will not happen because you control the domain.
Unfortunately, the MyBrand feature is not always easy to tame. Many users encounter a 404 error when trying to access their branded feeds.