I spent quite a bit of time at Feedburner on the “Troubleshootize” page going through all the various fixes, including the “Nuclear Option” to resync my feed.  That kept garnering the following error messages:

The first one: There is an issue that must be addressed with your source for the feed “Out of Debt Again”

The second one: Your feed filesize is larger than 512K. You need to reduce its size in order for FeedBurner to process it. Tips for controlling feed file size with Blogger can be found in Tech Tips on Feedburner Forums, our support site.

The first message was lovely as obviously there is a problem, so thank you very much.  The second message was annoying as this blog is a self-hosted WordPress blog (while Out of Debt Again used to be a Blogger blog, it has not been for nearly two years).  Also, apparently the Feedburner Forums are no longer supported and no one seems to be getting any answers there.

I first suspected that one of my many plug-ins may be causing the problem, as fourteen of them were in need of updating.  I always begin any updating or troubleshooting session by first downloading the folder in which my blog resides from the server to my hard drive on my computer via FTP (I use Filezilla, a free FTP program). Having safely downloaded a copy of the site, next I had a backup of the database sent by email.  Finally satisfied that my blog was thoroughly backed up, I proceeded to update the fourteen plug-ins. That didn’t work. I then began moving all my widgets out of the sidebars, in the event that in my remodeling last week I’d put in some code erroneously. No dice.

So I began my search on Google for answers.  I found a lot of solutions, but none of them worked.

In my travels, I discovered this cool site: Feed Validator.  It said my feed was valid, but it did suggest that I had one bit of odd code which I should try to correct while showing some 1300 lines of code!  The error was around line 800.

I’d put out a desperate email to some blogger friends, and it was suggested that I try disabling all the plug-ins that were not vitally important to my blog.  That jarred my memory and I remembered that I had read somewhere that sometimes a plug-in can cause a problem.   So I began disabling plug-ins.  I wondered how was I going to know which one was the problem?  I knew I couldn’t just keep writing test posts every time I disabled a plug-in.  So I decided to disable twenty of them and then write a test post and WHOOHOO, success!!  When I clicked on my RSS subscription button the new test post was finally there.  One of the twenty plug-ins was the problem.

I went over to Feed Validator and ran my site again.  Those 1300 lines of code were gone!!   Oh!! That’s how I could have tested!

I decided to re-enable each plug-in, and then go to Feed Validator after each one was enabled and test.   As it turns out, I was able to successfully re-enable each plug-in, and there are no problems with my feed.   I remembered that was the other part of what I’d read… that sometimes all it takes is disabling and re-enabling the plug-ins to fix a myriad of problems.

Personal Finance Articles I Read This Week

• Mrs. Money Contemplates a High Deductible Health Plan - Ultimate Money Blog
• Ninja eats Humble Pie – Punch Debt in the Face. Check out that sinister looking stick figure shoving pie down Ninja’s throat!
• Chase $100 Cash Bonus Link from Ink with Ultimate Rewards Card – The Digerati Life.  This is a business card. I almost fainted while asking my boss if there was any chance we could sign up for it so that I can stop making company purchases out of my own pocket.  She got permission and now I’ll have a company card in my own name.  I’m also seriously considering having Mr. A sign up for the card for his second business. He has a credit card for his main business but ends up using it to buy items for the second company and it makes it harder to keep his books.
• Jackie makes a plan to pay off her mortgage by 2011 over at Money Crush – It’s All in How You Look at It. She and her husband are looking for ways to come up with several thousand extra dollars a month. Wow!
• Should I Join an Exclusive Sports Club? over at Financial Samurai.  I don’t think Sam should join.  What do you think he should do?
• Don’t Forget to Enter the $150 Visa Gift Card Giveaway at Bargain Babe
• Lottery Winners Who Lost It All over at Frugal Zeitgeist
• 4 Tips to Pay Off Your Debt As Soon As Possible – Money Help for Christians
• 5 Things You Can Still Do to Increase Your Tax Refund – KNS Financial Faithful With a Few. Yes, it seems it is that time of the year again where we need to start thinking about filing our taxes.

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