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News — new section 1.5, anonymous comments, feedburner

By Alex on June 6th, 2007 | last modified by on June 6th, 2007

First, I inserted a new tutorial page. Section 1.5 now gives an very basic introduction to operators.

Second, it is now possible to comment anonymously. Akismet is active to stop any spam.

Third, the recent comments sidebar will not show trackbacks any more. It looks much cleaner now.

Finally, we are now hooked into Feedburner. And believe me, I had a hell of a time getting that to work! Feedburner is a free news feed managing service that allows you to aggregate and manage multiple news feeds. They were just bought out by Google.

When I was setting up Feedburner, I installed the latest feedburner wordpress plugin, which is trivial to install and theoretically trivial to set up. However, because this site’s name is “Learn C++”, and feedburner doesn’t like +’s, Feedburner suggested the Feed URL be “http://feeds.feedburner.com/LearnC”. At first I figured this wasn’t bad, so I configured the plugin to use that name. But then I realized that it would make more sense if the name was “LearnCpp” instead of “LearnC”. So I changed it and set the plugin to redirect to LearnCpp. At that point, I should have been done. 11pm, time for bed.

However, every time I clicked on the RSS link, it would still take me to LearnC, where it would toss up a 404 page not found because there was nothing at LearnC. It seemed completely determined to ignore my request to use LearnCpp, and for the life of me I could not figure out why. After trying everything, from renaming the site, to disabling other plugins to look for conflicts, to poking through the WordPress database using MyPhpAdmin, I was ready to call it quits (after all, it was 12:15 by that point). So I disabled the feedburner plugin, and as a last measure before bed, clicked the RSS link to make sure the XML feed had returned. And it took me to LearnC and the 404. WHAT?!? I disabled the plugin! Why was it still redirecting me?

That’s when I got suspicious. A few Google searches later, I had my answer. The problem wasn’t the site, or the plugin. The problem was my web browser!

Apparently Firefox (I don’t know about IE) will cache redirects, and even more apparently, it doesn’t do a good job of updating them when they change. Consequently, it had cached the fact that my rss feed was temporarily redirected to LearnC. When I changed it to LearnCpp, it was still using the cached version. All I had to do was clear out my browser cache and the whole thing worked as expected.

Of course, by then it was 1am and I felt both stupid for staying up so late and thrilled that I’d managed to solve the problem. That led to the next problem. It took about an hour to wind down enough to go to sleep. Today, I am feeling pretty tired.

Tired, but victorious. :)

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