The Joys Of Being Your Own IT Department - And Of DNS and RSS

Tonight I was looking at my danyork.me aggregation site and I was confused… why were my posts from my danyork.com site NOT appearing in the master list? I *knew* I had written there.

Of course my initial thought was some problem with the RSS feed. Yep! 

On danyork.me I’m using the older FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress that does RSS syndication. A quick look told me that the feed it was supposed to be pulling in was:

https://www.danyork.com/rss.xml

Except… that was showing up as invalid XML. 🤷‍♂️

After some trial and error, I discovered that… I need to drop the “www” on the feed! 🤦‍♂️ If I instead use this:

https://danyork.com/rss.xml

Then… everything works!

I made the update to the FeedWordPress settings, forced an “Update Now” and … 🎉 …. the posts started appearing again at danyork.me!

So it’s somewhere between a DNS issue (cue “it’s always DNS!”) and a web hosting issue. My DanYork.com site is one of the ones that I still have running on the old TypePad platform…. and THAT  is where I suspect the issue lies.

www.danyork.com is just a CNAME pointing over to lodestar.typepad.com, where TypePad is then redirecting it to my specific blog. However, if I do a ‘curl’ for the www URL, I can see I get a plain HTML page that looks like it may be trying to do a meta refresh. If I do a ‘curl’ on the non-www URL, I get the correct RSS feed.

However, in an amusing bit of 🤦‍♂️, the RSS feed says that it should be at “www.danyork.com”:

<atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" href="https://www.danyork.com/rss.xml" type="application/rss+xml" />

But of course that won’t work.

So… something for me to dive into at some point and figure out.

Maybe I should call my IT team!  Oh, wait… that’s … me! 🤦‍♂️