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 🙂