TQuizzle.com

So I noticed something wrong today…my feed. It was returning an error, and not displaying correctly.

Since I don’t subscribe to to own feed (I’m not that vain), I didn’t see that it wasn’t displaying. It essentially was blank with an error.

Checking out FeedValidator.Org, I saw that it not only wasn’t validating, it had errors on lines 1 and 2…which were empty. Empty I said? Good thing FeedValidator is so smart, it knew what I was using (WordPress) to produce the feed then offered some suggestions to fixing it.

I guess it’s a known problem with some plugins and theme files having empty lines after or before their relative opening <?php or closing ?> tags.

So began the journey to find out what was causing this…

Per FeedValidator’s recommendation, I checked wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php both of which were fine. Then checked wp-config to see if the problem was there…still no love. I checked my theme’s functions.php file since I use that immensely in customizing the look of this blog but it too didn’t have any empty lines. Next step…checking all the plugins.

For some reason, I started alphabetically from the bottom and checked WP-Super-Cache. Boom. There’s the culprit. Right at the end of the file there was a ?> followed by two empty lines. I deleted those, and all-of-the-sudden the feed validated again. W00t.

Now you 30 people or so that subscribe to my feed…it’s working again. Thanks for hanging in there.

So you’re already ahead of the game by having a good 404 page, right? Good, now you can even add a bit more spice to them.

While on Google’s Webmaster Tools page, I noticed this little gem:
<script type="text/javascript">
var GOOG_FIXURL_LANG = 'en';
var GOOG_FIXURL_SITE = 'http://www.mydomain.com';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://linkhelp.clients.google.com/tbproxy/lh/wm/fixurl.js"></script>

Since users need to find what they’re looking for within 7 seconds to avoid them leaving your site…use this little guy to help out. It will make it easier for them to find the information they’re looking for. So, you’re probably wondering, “What does that do to help me?” Good question, here’s a rundown of what Google says:

• It adds a search box for your site with appropriate search suggestions.
• It tries to provide alternatives to incorrect URLs.

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