RSS/Feed issues: Fixed (details)

For a few hours today my nice little RSS Feed, with close to 20k subscribers, was replaced by a pile of ads for some record label called True Tiger Recordings.

As much as I often consider ditching the whole writing/speaking career to be a lead singer in a rock band, that’s not what happened today.

A few kind folks, Peter, Kirill, Dave, Adam, Neil, Greg, Meh (hey, that’s the name you left) – let me know almost immediately that something strange was up, and as I don’t check my own RSS Feed often, and they saw it well before I did. Thanks guys, I’m in your debt.

I assumed I’d been hacked, which has happened before. I run mostly vanilla stuff, so usually if I’m hacked it’s an old one, and I can find a patch or a solution online. Not the case. So the hunt began.

In about an hour I’d sorted it out. My web-dev had fixed another problem with redirects earlier today, and reinstalled a WP plug-in called Permanent Redirect (you can see where this is going, can’t ya?). Either by a fluke or some weird config behavior, it defaulted to using a feedburner URL for ALL feed redirects.

Now I don’t use feedburner. Never have. Worse, I don’t understand how it could have magically defaulted to a generic feedburner URL that works: http://feeds.feedburner.com/feed, much less one as comically unrelated to the normal going’s on here, but I need to chat with my web-dev to sort out if anything odd happened during the other fix.

Anyway, apologies for the interruption in any case. Fun bit of drama for me today: now to find a nice bottle of wine :)

4 Responses to “RSS/Feed issues: Fixed (details)”

  1. Kai

    Thought I’d stumbled on another side of your creativity which had otherwise remained secret! Glad to see all is back to normal.

    Reply
  2. Scott

    The funny thing is, I bet those guys are trying to figure out the big traffic boost they got yesterday :)

    Reply
  3. Amy

    So, is the problem completely fixed? Because I read your site using google reader, and I am still seeing blog posts for Eye of the Tiger intermingled with your actual posts.

    Reply
  4. Scott

    Hi Amy – I verified this just now. Not sure what’s going on – Stay tuned.

    Reply

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