Inspirated

Today, I woke up to find that my FeedBurner feed for Inspirated has stopped updating because the source feed is timing out. After digging around a little, the source of the problem turned out to be long posts containing (hundreds of lines of) code.

At this point, I could change settings in WordPress to display “summarized” texts instead of full ones in my feeds. The downside of which was the fact that it would require readers to click through their feed aggregators even for posts that weren’t long enough to cause server delays. The better solution was to use the wp-cache plugin so that WordPress wouldn’t have to “process” the feeds at each request. The plugin itseld works like a charm, but getting things working again with FeedBurner was a bit of PITA. Here’s the order of steps that worked:

• Disable the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin in WordPress administration panel.
• Access the original feed to make wp-cache do its magic.
• Resync the feed in FeedsBurner administration panel.
• Enable the FeedSmith plugin again.

It took me almost a couple of hours to sort out the whole picture, and ironically, one of the songs in my playlist at the time had lyrics that I’ve quoted in the post-title.