If you have ever ran your RSS feed through a feed validator and received the message: “Self reference doesn’t match document location” and have no idea what that means, I may have a few tips for you.

While this is just a recommendation and not an error, it could still cause you problems depending on how you’re using your feed.  I host my RSS feed on my own site, run it through FeedBurner and then distribute the feed to different sites for distribution.  One of those places has been having problems with my feed lately and I’ve had this recommendation showing up after trying to validate it through http://feedvalidator.org.

I didn’t think it was worth worrying about, but I recently fixed it just to make sure it wasn’t causing any problems.  It took me a while to figure it out, but it’s basically a self-referencing link.  If for any reason the URL of your feed does not exactly match this, you’ll get the “recommendation” message.

• The first thing to check is to make sure that link is the URL people use for your feed.  If you’re doing fancy HTTP or .htaccess redirects, you should be giving people the destination URL, not the one that redirects them to something else.
• The next thing to check for are spaces in your URL.  Even though some operating systems allow spaces in file names, it’s a general practice to try and avoid them.  Try using dashes or hyphens.
• The last thing to remember is your links are case-sensitive.  If you’re sending someone to http://mysite.com/feed but your RSS feed references itself as http://mysite.com/Feed, you’re going to get the “error” message when you try to validate your RSS feed.  The hard part can be tracking down where this is set,  depending on how your feed is created and how you’re manipulating it.

I hope these few tips can help you out.  Generally it’s hard to find any help when looking around for an answer to a question like this.

Afterwards I like to mash/spread my potatoes on a plate and pile on the goodies.  Today I went with butter, garlic, oregano, chives, pepper,sour cream, cooked carrots and peas, and ketchup on top.  Delicious.  I was going to take a picture but accidentally ate it all.

http://moviecitynews.com/voices/2009/090302_critics.html

http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/04/april-is-national-grilled-cheese-month.html

I really like the included Joomla search module.  It’s works great but I just realized it doesn’t return results for any of my blog posts.  I had tried setting up Google search before, but it didn’t work too well.  I then tried to set it up again today and was still having problems with it finding my blog posts.  The weird thing is that if I do a normal Google search, go to the advanced options and search just my site, I can find blog posts.

I took the searchbox code Google provided and popped it into a module and created a static page for the search results.  I also popped the provided search results code onto the static page.  When I do a search with the module it goes to the static page, but doesn’t show any results, it just shows an empty search bar.  Then when I type my search into the search bar on the static page, no results for blog posts.

Am I doing something wrong here?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/18961264/detail.html

In an unprecedented move, the Criterion people have decided to add a film to it’s collection from 2008.  Usually it takes a while to get in.  Can you guess what made it?  No, not Dark Knight, Milk, The Wrestler or Slumdog Millionaire.  Give up?  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Now I know that Armageddon is on the Criterion list.  So maybe this just follows suit.  The aging and the time stuff was kind of cool, but other then that it was just ok.  Thoughts on this?  Am I coming off all High Fidelity elite?