I’ve never had issues with my rss feeds in the past. Granted, I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 25 subscribers, but still, everything always worked just fine. When Google took over Feedburner, I waited as long as I could, but finally migrated over to the “new” service a couple of months ago. For a few weeks, I didn’t notice anything, likely because I wasn’t posting much.

But then I got Thesis and started fiddling with things. When I started working on the footer, trying to get more usability out of it with some pretty hefty changes. Alas, none of the changes worked the way I wanted them to, so I went to bed after setting everything back the way it was. Or at least I thought I set everything back to the way it was.

I woke up the next morning with the following message waiting for me in my inbox from the good folks at Feedburner:

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

• line 1, column 0: XML parsing error: <unknown>:3:0: no element found [help]

In addition, interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendation.

• Feeds should not be served with the “text/html” media type [help]

Source: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/RobbFlynn

Looking into it a bit further, I discovered that I had also lost all my subscribers except for 1 (which I think is me, oddly enough. Guess I’ll find out when I publish this post!), and that the 2 “help” links were really anything but help. I know what Feedburner does, but I don’t know how it does it, so their explanations as to what is actually wrong with the feed doesn’t go very far in telling me how to fix it.

So right now, I have a subscribe link that doesn’t subscribe, and I’ll have to wait until the weekend to try and figure out a. how to fix it, or, b. some sort of workaround. Drag. If anyone has suggestions or random thoughts on the matter, I’d love to hear them.

There’s still a bunch of changes that I want to make, but for now, this is it. The overall style has remained the same, and the goal now is to streamline and focus on usability and content. Most alterations will be subtle, with only a few drastic design changes (such as the currently gawd-awful footer) in the pipeline.

Feel free to offer up suggestions, especially if there’s something I have done (or haven’t done for that matter) that really annoys you. Unless, of course, you are using IE6. If that’s the case, then there’s little I can do for you. It’s bad enough trying to maintain compatibility for modern browsers. IE6 is… what… 8 years old now? Do yourself a favor and go upgrade. Personally, I recommend Mozilla’s Firefox, but I also have friends who are enamored with Google’s Chrome. Anything other than IE and you’re a winner in my book.

Earthrise.

Taking a vacation from the internet for a couple weeks, so there may or may not be anything new while I unplug and unwind. I’m sure you’ll manage without me.

I’ve been catching up on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles via DVR and it saddens me that the Terminator franchise has been reduced to a series devolved to a soap opera revolving around teen angst. **Edit** After getting all the way caught up, I should point out that all the teen angst disappeared with the Riley sub-plot, thank gawd. Moreover, with the developments of the last 2 episodes, hopefully the writers realized that they really got themselves distracted by running 4 subplots in addition to the main throughline. The series works much better when it stays focused on John and Sarah as opposed to introducing tangential elements that take 8-9 episodes to reach any kind of payoff. The result is the anti-climactic effect the closing of those tangents has when they are finally resolved, a la the horribly resolved  Derek Reese conflict, which was a major disappointment.

Video of the Week: Bruce Lee vs. Iron Man

I have a LinkedIn profile, but I ignore it. I have a MySpace profile, but I ignore it. I have a Plaxo profile, and, guess what… I ignore it, too. I have a Facebook page, and, while I don’t quite ignore it, thanks to the latest horrific design I don’t pay all that much attention to it any longer. But it makes no matter. They all point to this site, and they all have some form of my contact info on them. If people want to get in touch with me, they can. The simple fact is that I find social networking increasingly annoying and actually anti-social. At the very least, they instill, to some degree, anti-social behavior, much the same way that the veritably infamous AOL chatrooms of the 90’s did.

One of these days I’ll figure out how to properly work the “publish in the future” option /grumble.

Happy Easter! (should you believe in that sort of thing… otherwise… Happy Sunday!)