Posted By admin on April 25, 2009

After much back and forth with Matt Oxley, a current Entrecard mod, and Ben Barden, a former Entrecard mod, I may have uncovered the solution to the problem.

This is going to be a long, technical post, which I will put into “newbie” terms so others may benefit from my efforts. In a nutshell, much of the issue lies with the ability to communicate with one another, and the ability to think independently as I was troubleshooting this issue. I did NOT solve this by myself. I also had a roommate follow the very instructions presented, and she could not find the solution either.

So, here we go… finding the solution to the problem.

My original complaint: Entrecard not awarding EC for blog posts for this blog.

The problem: Entrecard software couldn’t find my RSS Feed (something that was pointed out by Matt.)

The troubleshooting process:_

From this post, Matt directed me to change this line of code

<link rel=“alternate” type=“text/xml” title=“RSS .92″

href=“http://choicebusinessblog.com/feed/rss/” />

to this…
<link rel=“alternate” type=“text/xml” title=“RSS .92″
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies” />

Nowhere could I find a place to make that adjustment, so as you can see by my previous post, I felt the first solution was to reinstall the Entrecard widget so at least the spider had a chance to read what I felt were the correct feeds. I had validated every feed I saw with feedvalitator.org.

Fortunately, Ben Barden read this blog and added his assessment, directing me to a help file at Entrecard. Trust me, it wasn’t easy to find, but here it is, reprinted in it’s entirety.

I found this by going to Entrecard>Help>Troubleshooting Guide>Recent posts do not show up in your profile

***** Before I reprint this, do you see any immediate connection to my problem?******

Recent posts do not show up in your profile

Entrecard displays the 5 latest posts in your profile so other members can easily see your latest content. There are a few things that are required for these posts to show up.

You need to look for the feed auto-discovery icon in your browser - it looks like this:

If you do not see your latest posts in your profile, please check the following.

• Does your site have an RSS feed?
• Do you have feed auto-discovery turned on? i.e. if you go to your site, does an orange feed icon appear at the end of the address bar in your browser? Note: this will not work in older browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6.
• If you click the auto-discovery feed icon, does it actually display your feed?
• Is your feed provided as RSS 2.0?
• If you have multiple feeds, is the first feed in the list the one that should be picked up? Is it in RSS 2.0?
• If you use FeedBurner, have you used the “Convert Format Burner” option to force your feed to display as RSS 2.0?
• Is the URL of your feed displayed in full? e.g. yoursite.com/blog/rss rather than /rss
• Are you a new user? If so, your posts will not show up immediately. They will take some time to appear. Please be patient. Ensure that all of the above points are in order.

Here’s an example of what your profile might look like if the recent posts show up.

RSS auto-discovery

Mentioned above is auto-discovery; this is required for Entrecard to pick up your recent posts and keep them updated. Some blogging systems may have an RSS option that you can turn on. If not you may need to add the following code to the header of your site:

<link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“Your site title” href=“Your RSS feed URL” />

Replace the two bits of bold text with the title of your site and the URL of your RSS feed.

Here is also a quick reprint of his instructions to me.

1. In your browser, look for the orange feed icon at the end of the address bar.
2. Click the icon. A list of three feeds will pop up.
3. Click the first feed (this is the one that Entrecard picks up). An error occurs.

I actually tried clicking all three of the feeds listed there and they all display the same error. The reason is because in the header of your blog, the URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

Remove “yourfeed” from the URL and it will work:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

Here’s what I did…

I began by looking in my Theme Editor at my header.php. I could never clearly identify the issue Matt pointed out.

I clicked on the big orange image in my right sidebar. No help there, as it worked just fine, showing me an RSS feed of my posts.

I found a little orange RSS feed in the footer of my blog, and when I clicked on it, I did get a feed error.

Now nearly simultaneously, Matt sent another comment:

I sen’t an email to you explaining what the problem was…there is a plugin that you may need to get that can often fix this as well…I think its just called the Feedburner plugin for wordpress….I had this same issue when i changed themes because it screwed up the code in my header…keep me updated on whether or not it works please

Since I couldn’t see the same RSS Error, I went looking to see if I had indeed installed the Feedburner plugin.

That is where I found the error that Ben was seeing…

I actually tried clicking all three of the feeds listed there and they all display the same error. The reason is because in the header of your blog, the URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

Remove “yourfeed” from the URL and it will work:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LetsDoBusinessWithRealOnlineCompanies

I did indeed have the Feedburner plugin installed and activated. You configure it by going to your Settings>Feedburner

During the setup, I mis-copied the following line for configuration.

Once you have created your FeedBurner feed, enter its address into the field below (http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed):

Only during the process of very carefully re-reading, and separating the posts from Matt and Ben did it finally dawn on me that this instruction was key…

1. In your browser, look for the orange feed icon at the end of the address bar.

Address bar — that’s the place where you type in the URL and the Orange Icon shows up only if you’re not looking an admin area of your site, such as I’m doing right now. I was reading the instructions from inside my admin area.

Once I see the proper credits show up in my Entrecard account, I will re-visit this process and see if there is some way I can wt

Related posts

• Want new banners or EC Avatars? (0)
• Entrecard Mod dares to speak out (3)
• Why Entrecard works for me across my blogs (5)
• Testing Entrecard and this blog for glitch (0)
• Is this spam… You tell me (7)

Categories: Entrecard
Tags: blog, ec, Entrecard, Feedburner, RSS feed, software, troubleshooting