The archives by category are simply not functioning properly and that has made the front page go all to hell below this slider, so, as some of you may have noticed, I’ve got rid of the magazine style theme that relied on category archives to provide the front page content.
Investigations are under way, things have been updated but the category archives are still playing up. Anyway, you can still read and comment on the latest posts. The problem appears to now be resolved: so should I stick with this look for the blog or revert to the previous theme?
Categories: Meta, technology
*waves extravagantly at the internet* We’re back! 
Privacy, anonymity, pseudonymity, outing, accountability: where are the boundaries? 
Crowdsourcing: accessibility on wordpress.com? 
Hoyden About Town 
Update: the category archives are still mostly not working, and I can’t see a good reason why some are working and others are not. I’ve added a message to the “no posts found” message that tells people that the posts do actually exist even though the blog isn’t displaying them.
In the meantime, please use the monthly archives or the tag archives to find related posts.
Now the tag archives aren’t working either. I’ve got no idea what’s happening here.
I’ve disabled most of the plugins to try and debug this. Bear with me if features you are expecting to see are not currently available.
Well, it looks like I was the only one who noticed/cared anyway, but whatever was happening with the archives seems to have resolved itself. Servers, it appears, have a mind of their own.
So should I stick with this look for the blog or revert to the previous theme?
I’m easy pleased – as long as the posts are here and “Recent Comments” is working, I’m happy! 🙂
I don’t get involved in tech things, it’s not one of my strengths. It doesn’t mean I don’t care! I like the new look. Recent comments rocks as mimbles said. I’m happy with whatever works for people.
It’s a bit plain, but for me the wrapping doesn’t matter – it’s the content I come here for.
An opinion!
I preferred the other theme with a bit more contrast between posts and other features. I didn’t like the slider though: it was annoying to not be able to get an overview of the most recent posts at a glance, especially when slightly less recently posts could be looked over. (It might perhaps be more useful for a “Greatest Hits” set of links or something where someone is less likely to be coming to the front page in order to see all of them as quickly as possible.)
I wanted to really play around with the features of the other theme so that I fully understood them, but I’m happy to go back to a simpler front-page now.
I’ve tweaked the stylesheet to provide more contrast between the posts/comments and the rest of the site.
I quite like it this way. Sleek.
I just realised I haven’t seen you in my RSS reader for days. Perhaps the change of theme broke it? I’m wondering whether I should delete the feed from my Bloglines and resubscribe or whether it’ll fix itself.
Hi Susan,
The change of theme shouldn’t have done anything – I made sure the feed was pointing to our Feedburner feed immediately, as has been the case with Hoyden for about 18 months now.
Doublecheck that your Bloglines is set to pull from http://feeds.feedburner.com/HoydenAboutTown
Thanks for the quick reply, Tigtog! I checked, though, and Edit Subscription says
“Feed URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/HoydenAboutTown”
but the Feed Error flag says
“The feed URL returns a page that does not look like an RSS feed. This can be caused by the feed URL being incorrect, or it can be caused by a configuration issue with the server hosting the feed.”
Apparently it last got the updated feed on 31st August. If it was the configuration, thought, I’d have thought other people would have noticed by now. I’ll try again later.
Datapoint: my feed has been updating without a hitch throughout. I’m using http://feeds.feedburner.com/HoydenAboutTown?format=xml
It won’t let me add format=xml to the feed name. I deleted that subscription and resubscribed, but it still only runs up to “WTF, YouTube? Documentaries about rape victims are not Unsafe Content”, and says “Updated: Tue, Aug 31 2010 7:52 AM”. 😦
Susan, I can only imagine that Feedburner has changed something and your reader software has not yet caught up. Do you have the most recent version of Bloglines? Perhaps an email to them to let them know might help them tweak whatever’s necessary.
I also notice that the Feedburner subscription page for HaT has a special button for subbing with Bloglines. Have you tried using that instead of subscribing manually?
Hi Tigtog,
I tried that button and it says I’m already subscribed. I’ve filled in a contact form: “Your message has been sent to Bloglines. Please allow two business days for Bloglines to review your message.” If that doesn’t work I’ll try subscribing in Dreamwidth instead!
(Sorry about spamming this page, should I be using email?)
Bringing it up here is fine, Susan – you may not be the only one having the same problem!
I just discovered that Bloglines is closing down at the beginning of October! So I doubt they’ll bother fixing the bug; I’ve subscribed to your feed on DW instead.
Can you recommend a good RSS reader?
I use Google reader – I find it very no fuss. Just need to create a Google account and then off you go.
If Bloglines allows you to create an OPML export file, then you could just import all your existing feed subscriptions into Google Reader. (Probably most other feed readers also do this)
http://www.google.com/intl/en-AU/googlereader/faq.html#export