As some of you may have noticed, there has been a problem with the RSS and ATOM feeds for this blog for a few days. I first noticed it yesterday and others then mentioned it to me.
My first thought? “I didn’t changed anything, how could it break?”
My second thought was that WordPress 2.6.1 is about to come out, so I will wait and install that. Perhaps the problem will magically go away.
It turns out that I did change one little thing, turning off feed tracking in Mint, my stats application. Unfortunately, I didn’t deactivate the WordPress plugin that inserted the tracking code. So the feeds got all messed up.
The new version of WordPress would not have fixed anything and might have made it harder to debug.
Things seem stable now, feed-wise. I plan to upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1 over the weekend. (What do YOU do on Saturday and Sunday?) My new policy is to wait the month after a major new release of WordPress to pick up the bug fix release. It’s not hard but it is also not trivial to move to a new version, so I’ve decided it’s better to not quite be on the bleeding edge.
WordPress got much easier to upgrade once I moved all my scattered hacks into a proper plugin (so overwriting WP’s files didn’t blow them away) and checked out the codebase with Subversion.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion
I just upgraded to WP 2.6.1 by typing “svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.1 .” (note the . at the end), then doing the 5-second database upgrade via the web admin interface.
And there I was thinking you had stayed up all night writing for us 12 posts. :-)