cgibb1014

OK. I fixed all the errors. The page now validates.

I pinged Technorati. It showed my most recent update.

The tags still don’t work, which is what I expected.

Perhaps it takes longer to update their tag indexes so I’ll check again tomorrow. But it doesn’t appear that validation is the problem.

Thanks for explaining that so clearly, macmanx.

Since some of the Technorati tags work fine and they are all using the same template, I don’t know how that could be the problem, since I don’t change/edit the code or template each time I edit a post.

Each time the Technorati bot spiders through my main page, it should see the same errors.

I also copy the code for the Technorati tags directly from the Technorati site.

I will look into it more, though, to see if any changes I have made to the template (or the code that I downloaded) is producing errors that I can correct. Then I’ll try again.

My categories seem to be tagged automatically and I’ve seen them in the listings. In addition, *some* of my tags work fine.

As for validation errors, what am I supposed to do about that? Isn’t WordPress code producing the feed? If so, wouldn’t that mean that WordPress is the problem rather than Technorati?

I’ve had the same problem with Technorati tags. If people use the tag in a search, I come up but if they list blog posts with one of my tags, my posts are often not listed.

I get no response from Technorati support either.

I cut and paste the sample code from their list of posts tagged with a certain tag and it still doesn’t work.

I’ve also tried manual pings and that doesn’t seem to help.

The problem with the space was caused when I copied and pasted the URL from the Google verify page into the new file name when I created it on my server. Although I didn’t highlight the space in front of the name, for some reason it copied and pasted one in front of the filename. It was so small that I didn’t notice it in the directory listing.

I just renamed the Google verify filename by putting the cursor in front of the first character and hitting backspace. Sure enough there was a space there. Then I was able to verify with no problem.

Arne’s plug-in worked great and Google seemed very happy with it.

I think that part of the problem might be that many people used to link to the old typepad URL format and now the URLs don’t really exist anymore. Google bases part of its rank on how many other people are pointing to the page.

I don’t know a lot about how the search engines rank but I experienced a big drop in traffic in general after my switch from TypePad to WP. Now, traffic is picking up, looks like it will be double this month what it was last month, but still way below what it was before the move.

The big change, however, is that most of my hits now come from Yahoo and a few from Google, whereas 90% of my hits used to be from Google and very few from Yahoo. I’m hoping the Google sitemap will help change that.

If it doesn’t, Yahoo will be my new best friend.

I’m sure glad I read this threat, though, because I was thinking of changing back to the standard WP URL format because I hate those long permalink names. Now, I’ll just try to think of two or three keywords for the titles. Thanks!

Well, it still gives me the same error when I try to “verify” sitemap.xml but it now says “submitted”-“7 hours ago” “last downloaded”-“1 hour ago” “sitemap status”-“OK”. The status used to be “pending.”

So I think the plugin worked great but there’s some kind of bug with Google’s verify link.

This is really strange.

I installed arnee’s plugin and it ran with no problem. I singed into Google and gave it the sitemap url and tried to verify it and it came back and said “we would like to tell you some things about your sitemap but your probably want them to kept private so create a file (in the same directory as the sitemap) with the filename: and then it gave me this really long name for an .html file, for example: verylonggooglename.html

So I created the file (they said they didn’t care what was in it). When I told it to verify again, it said it couldn’t find the verification file. I tried to get to it in my browser and got a 404 error.

What’s really strange is if I typed in the domain name of my site and then copied and pasted their long file name after it, it could find the file.

So if they were looking for https://www.mydomain.com/%20verylonggooglename.html they would find it. Because when I paste the file name at the end of domain name it adds a “percent sign20” to the name and the file is found. But since google doesn’t add in between the domain name and the file name in the URL they can’t verify the sitemap file.

I looked up {percent sign 20} and it has something to do with encoding and escaping but I don’t know why it’s inserting it when I copy and paste the filename after the URL and can find it. But if I cut and paste the entire URL that google is looking for it says it can’t find the file.

Anybody else had this happen?

[Note: I can’t type the symbol for percent sign 20 in this message, because it won’t show up. So you might not understand what I’m saying at all.]

One of the best things about WordPress is the the way it handles comment moderation. On TypePad I would wake up in the morning and find that I had comment spam on dozens of posts and have to delete them one by one.

With WordPress, unless I’ve specifically approved a comment by a person before, their comments go to moderation and require my approval before getting posted. I can flag it as spam or just delete it and it never sees the light of day.

So while I can appreciate that you don’t like comments that you consider offensive, I’m not sure why, given all the comment handling features in WordPress, why they’re a problem, unless you just don’t want to have to read them in the first place.

Under options/discussion there’s a section that should put comments from any offending URL into moderation where it can be deleted before it posts. “When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URI, e-mail, or IP, hold it in the moderation queue…”

So I’m not really sure what the problem is here. As soon as you read the first offending sentence you just hit delete.

Another possibility is that your host has some way to ban certain domains. The stats I get from Dreamhost show literally hundreds of hits on my blog every day from domains with words like texas-holdem, poker, casino etc, in them yet none of those domains has ever successfully left any spam on my blog. These spammers are always at the top of the list of referring domains, but they never get through. So there might be something you can try at the host level.

When I asked if they knew what had caused the problem, the tech responded that she didn’t, only that it was a problem with the MySQL on my shared server.
So, vkaryl, you may be right that they did an upgrade or changed something with the MySQL and just didn’t get it right.
Thanks.

It wasn’ t a problem with bandwidth, I’m only using about 1% of my allotment. Sure didn’t use much today with my site down for 7 hours.

It’s back up for now.

This was their response:

Sorry about the oversight. We re-configured your mysql service, and your blog shows fine now.

I don’t know why that took seven hours.

I guess if it happens again, I’ll know exactly what to ask for: “Please ‘re-configure’ mysql service.”

Thanks, angsman.
For some reason the single.php file doesn’t show up in the list of files under Edit Theme, so that’s why I couldn’t find the code.
But once I could get the file into the general file editor, I was able to change it to simply display the Trackback URL.
I was also able to add a <div> id="comments" </div> right before the
<?php comments_template(); ?> statement so that now when you click on “comments” on the main page it takes you directly to the comments box.

Another template would have been nice but there’s no guarantee that is any less fubar than this one.

I still don’t know why the single.php file doesn’t show up on the edit template page.

I know that.
It’s the word “trackback” that needs to be clicked on the comment page.

I’m about to move from TypePad to WordPress so I appreciate all these comments and suggestions. TypePad has told me there is no way for them to redirect hits to my posts to my new location (which I haven’t chosen yet) so I guess I’m going to lose all those hits I’ve been getting from Google.

But at least if I can save the content which is 1400 posts, that will be helpful and WordPress will give me more control over the blog in the future.