ArticlesOddThinking is apparently suffering from a bug in WordPress.
If you can’t see this post, then you may have the problem it is talking about.
The old-fashioned feed URLs are saying that there are no posts or comments to see. The new feed URLs are working fine.
This has identical symptoms to a bug that was fixed in WordPress 2.5.1. I am running WordPress 2.5.1. I have confirmed that I have the code-change required to fix it. Spooky. I have started the escalation path.
The workaround is easy; if you first subscribed to OddThinking feeds some time ago, resubscribe to OddThinking with whatever software you use for such things. (Don’t forget to re-subscribe to comments too.)
Of course, the very people who need to do this are the people who don’t know this post exists and assume that the blog is dead.
Comment by Julian on June 16, 2008
If you are reading this comment in a comment feed, but don’t see the post it refers to in your OddThinking post feed, please visit to find the resolution.
Comment by Richard Atkins on June 16, 2008
Strangely enough, I was seeing posts for comments but not for articles for a while there. I assumed it was because you retired the old RSS feed and switched to only providing an Atom feed. Is there more to it than that?
Comment by Julian on June 16, 2008
There is more to it than that.
I didn’t remove support for any feed technologies; I just stopped advertising some of them (e.g. RSS 0.92)
Simiilarly, WordPress didn’t stop supporting any feed URLs; it just stopped advertising the ones with .php in the name.
It is these old, no longer advertised, but still used URLs that have started playing up in recent WordPress version.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on June 16, 2008
Why not at least put some permanent redirects in place to consolidate the subscribers of various formats at a single URI each?
Comment by Julian on June 16, 2008
Aristotle,
Short answer: I don’t know why WordPress doesn’t do this.
Longer answer: The obvious place to do that would be in the Apache .htaccess file. WordPress has been moving away from changing the .htaccess file. Now they seem to have a static .htaccess file, and do all of their redirects in the PHP code.
It is the redirecting PHP code that had the original bug (and perhaps still does.)
Why are they avoiding modifying the .htaccess? I don’t know. Perhaps it was difficult to make it portable to other web-servers? Pure conjecture.
I believe the PHP redirects aren’t true HTTP error codes, but merely making the same data available from several URLs. Why did they do that? I don’t know. Perhaps some key feed readers didn’t follow the redirect/update their records properly, which lead to a doubling of hits on the feed? Pure conjecture.
If I can’t get an official answer, I will need to add my own .htaccess redirects to fix this. I don’t look forward to that. As an occasional user, Apache’s mod_rewrite module scares me. That’s not conjecture, that’s a plain fact!
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on June 16, 2008
Oh, c’mon – mod_rewrite, scary? It’s just a
s///, effectively. It has a few quirky corners, but most of them are caused by having to fit into Apache conf syntax; conceptually it really isn’t hard.Comment by Julian on June 16, 2008
I counter with two quotes:
Where did I get these quotes from? The opening page of the mod_rewrite manual!
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on June 17, 2008
To a sysadmin it might be voodoo; to a programmer it shouldn’t be. As for the first quote, it is patently false: Sendmail is a Turing machine, whereas mod_rewrite quite obviously is not.
Comment by العاب on August 5, 2008
Wow Thank you
العاب