Blogging Tips

A lot of people have been having problems viewing Blogging Tips recently. This post is just to let you know that you shouldn’t have any problems viewing the site now (this message is primarily for RSS subscribers who couldn’t view the main site).

So what happened? Well, last month I removed the Feedburner plugin which redirects the feed to Feedburner and replaced it with a redirection code in the main htaccess file. This allowed me to link to each authors unique RSS feed, a feature which WordPress has by default but is unfortunately turned off when you use the FeedSmith Feedburner plugin.

A few days later I went away for a weeks holiday with 10 friends to Skiathos in Greece, to attend a friends wedding in the neighbouring city of Volos in the mainland. The hotel didn’t have any internet connections nor was there any internet cafes around so I didn’t take my netbook.

Unknown to me, I hadn’t set up the redirect correctly so when I returned I noticed the Blogging Tips feed hadn’t been updated in 10 days. Feedburner isn’t always the most accurate website but it showed a drop of around 500-600 subscribers, so clearly a lot of people thought that the site was just no longer being updated and removed us from their newsreader (shame on them!! haha).

New Hosting Company

Around the same time I removed the Feedburner plugin, I moved to a new hosting company. I noticed a big drop in traffic but I put this down to the issue with Feedburner. However, once the issue was resolved I was a bit more suspicious as to why traffic was lower than normal.

I checked the stats from my server but nothing indicated that there was any downtime. The hosting company couldn’t see anything wrong either. It wasn’t until I released our new ebook last week that I knew something was definitely up as several newsletter readers emailed me saying that they could not download the file or view the site.

So tonight I asked Blogging Tips followers on Twitter to email me if they were having problems viewing the site. Big thanks to Igor, skibee and Craig Parker; who helped me and my hosting company figure out what was wrong.

Apparently, the DNS zones of several of my sites were a bit messed up when I migrated to my new host. This meant that some parts of the world could view the site fine but others couldn’t (it appears to be very random as my friend who lives just 5 miles away from me had problems viewing the site too!).

It might take 24 hours for the DNS to update in all areas. If you are still having problems viewing the site after that, please email me at info at bloggingtips dot com and I will work with you in resolving any problem there is

I apologise to those who have been having problems accessing the site. Hopefully everything should be working fine now.

thanks,
Kevin

p.s. This is a lesson to anyone who wants to make a major change to their blog before going on holiday!!