I spent nearly 2 solid days trying to figure out why the latest posts on one of my clients’ sites were not showing up in the “popup preview” provided by email marketing site MailChimp. I love http://MailChimp.com, but this had me stumped and my eyes were beginning to cross. I had already spent countless hours learning how to create a custom RSS feed, template and query in Wordpress (future, much bigger article). The answer had to be in either the RSS feed itself – which validated perfectly and showed up as planned in my Feedly page – or there was some Wordpress or MailChimp quirk. After reading, studying, trying and tweaking (see resources below), I finally found that it most likely had to do with the way Wordpress writes the publish date (lastBuildDate in XML) to the database. Just changing the date or unpublishing/republishing didn’t fix the problem, but copying the content and creating a brand new post (and chucking the old one) did. Luckily, I only had to do this for a few posts. Whew!

This all came about because I needed to reset the original publish date on a monthly RSS-to-email campaign to a different day and MailChimp was apparently not able to see some of the original posts as “new” when I paused and restarted my campaign a few times. Now it remains to be seen if this really fixes the problem for next month, too, but I have my fingers and toes crossed!

Custom RSS feed resources that I found helpful :

http://www.frank-verhoeven.com/create-an-rss-feed-with-wordpress/
http://yoast.com/custom-rss-feeds-wordpress/
http://www.pearsonified.com/2007/06/how-to-format-images-for-feed-readers.php
http://dailycupoftech.com/2007/07/25/creating-custom-wordpress-feeds/
http://digwp.com/2009/09/easy-custom-feeds-in-wordpress/
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification

(Cool Feed Me t-shirt available from http://www.bytelove.com/bytelove-clothes/geek/rss-feed-me/prod_34.html)

Posted via email from vizou

Depuis son lancement il y a moins qu’un an, je suis sérieusement amoureuse de l’application (extension Firefox) Feedly qui est un aggregateur de flux RSS sans pareille. C’est ma page d’accueil dans Firefox, ma lecture de soirée, ma façon de surveiller des centaines de sites ou blogues que je n’ai pas assez de temps à visiter par URL. De plus, l’équipe de Feedly est incroyable! Hier, j’ai eu le mauvais surprise de voir un élément de l’interface de Feedly change d’un manière choquant (pour moi). Je voulait pleurer… mais j’ai lancé un “tweet” @feedly et en moins de 1 minute j’ai eu un message direct! J’ai aussi fait une recherche sur les #hashtags Twitter où j’ai trouvé nombreuses de personnes insatisfait avec le “nouveau” Feedly. Ensuite, je suis allé laissé des objections sur GetSatisfaction (dont je ne suis pas vraiment un fan) et voilà, une réponse de Feedly dans 5 minutes… et la fin de l’histoire c’est que je ne suis pas la seule qui aimait pas les modifications; alors, ils m’ont demandé mes réponses et idées… et ils vont faire des changements pour plaire à tous qui aimait certains options dans l’original tableau de bord. Wow! Vive Feedly!

I just posted this using the web service http://posterous.com where you can create links with a host of blogs, social sites and more, and then send posts via email. I fooled around with it a bit first to see what it came out like and here are a few tips :

1. I’m posting to a WordPress blog (self-hosted) so I needed to set my default category in Dashboard/Settings/Write to the appropriate category for where I want the post to appear (this seems like something Posterous needs to deal with in the future, allowing some sort of method for selecting a category).

2. When I created my email, once I’d written it I set it to be formatted as plain text to avoid getting all sorts of crap code in my nice, neat post.

3. I’m using Apple Mail to send usually, so I after I attached an image, I made sure to select a decent size so it wouldn’t overwhelm my post.

That’s about it! It works just great and will save hassle when posting from the road (or my iPod Touch).