yjsoon

I’ve been using Steve Smith’s WordPress Feedburner Plugin to send my feeds over to FeedBurner — it’s a simple mod_rewrite strategy that first rewrites a local feed into some secret random address, which you point FeedBurner’s aggregator at, and then sends all feed traffic from here to FeedBurner’s resultant page.

Only thing is, WordPress 2.0 seems to have mucked something up with their new permalink rewrite engine, resulting in an odd error: The secret random feed address gives a 404 error in FeedBurner (and FeedValidator), but shows the feed fine in web browsers. This apparently only occurs when one has set WordPress to deliver custom permalinks (e.g. site/archive/date/title, as opposed to site/index.php?p=5). Explanation, from an outdated FeedBurner support page:

The issue works this way because browsers are supposed to render the Error Document that is sent when a requested URL is not found; in this case, the Error Document itself will be the feed. But with web service systems, there is no benefit to rendring this file (as it is not a feed) so most of the systems (including ours) stop processing at the 404 error report.

Here are the solutions I’ve found so far from the plugin page comments (after searching for over an hour): Switch back to default permalinks in the WordPress options, or edit .htaccess manually, changing /wp-rss2.php [QSA,L] to /wp-rss2.php [QSA,R,L]. From what I know about mod_rewrite (not very much), the R stands for “redirect to new URL”… but that’s all I know. Anyway, I’ve adopted the latter solution, which is preferable because I don’t have to ruin my established permalink structure.

Hope that helps someone trying to find an answer to this issue.