Help, my RSS feed is no longer working

[mdshanta]

Hi,

I just loaded Socrates today and my RSS feed no longer works. I have spent about 4 hours trying to figure it out and am no closer than I was 4 hours ago. I am not a techie person, so I am clueless what happened. Any help would be greatly appreciated. If it helps, my blog is yourspiritmindandbody.com.

[Dan Nickerson]

There is no correlation between a theme and the wordpress rss feed.

However, there's definitely something weird going on.. I viewed your source and you've got Disqus commenting.

So I just googled: wordpress disqus rss feed

You'll see it causes issues with the Wordpress RSS feed.. I'm sure your solution is in those results.

[mdshanta]

Hi Dan,

I tried everything with Disqus like shutting it off, etc, and it made no difference. I just spend 30 minutes chatting with a tech at Host Gator and he said it is an issue with the Socrates code. I have printed out our discussion below so you can see exactly what he checked out and said.

Thanks


(2:38:10pm)John M.:Welcome to HostGator.com Live Chat. My name is John, and I will be happy to assist you with your inquiry.
(2:38:19pm)John M.:May I ask the affected URL please?
(2:38:33pm)Mike:yourspiritmindandbody.com
(2:40:19pm)John M.:Thank you, just a moment while I take a look for you.
(2:41:32pm)John M.:Your RSS feed is still present in the HTML page there: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://yourspiritmindandbody.com/feed/" /> Unfortunately it appears that your new theme is not set up to create a graphical link for it.
(2:42:24pm)Mike:Any suggestions? Also, I tried going back to my old theme and I still couldn't see it.
(2:43:29pm)Mike:Also, when I type my url/feed, I just get a blank page.
(2:43:35pm)John M.:Where did you normally see it on your old theme?
(2:44:31pm)John M.:The feed is currently blank. It does exist. Let me take a look at it further though.
(2:44:41pm)Mike:I had it on the side bar. Also, when as I said when I would type yourspiritmindandbody.com/feed before I would see the xml code, now I don't see it with either theme
(2:45:34pm)John M.:I understand.
(2:46:47pm)John M.:May I ask your wp-admin login credentials please?
(2:47:04pm)Mike:for wordpress?
(2:48:06pm)Mike:user, ********************
(2:48:21pm)John M.:Thank you.
(2:52:18pm)John M.:Unfortunately I was unable to log in with those credentials, could you be using others?
(2:53:13pm)Mike:sorry, the password is*******************
(2:53:40pm)John M.:Thank you.
(2:56:24pm)John M.id you recently start using FeedBurner FeedSmith Extend as a plugin?
(2:56:55pm)Mike:For about a month and a half now, and all worked fine until yesterday.
(2:58:26pm)John M.:You are currently using the socrates theme though, is that correct?
(2:58:42pm)Mike:correct
(3:00:43pm)John M.:At the moment I show that the settings for your theme are set to display it.
(3:01:19pm)Mike:Any idea why it is not?
(3:02:58pm)John M.:It does actually output the feed link into your HTML, however it is inside the "TOP ADS" area, and appears to simply not be displayed when the page is rendered.
(3:03:28pm)John M.:<div id="new1" class="smallAd" style="height:90px;">
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/_spiritmindbody" target="_blank"><img src="http://yourspiritmindandbody.com/wp-content/themes/socrates/images/Twitter.png" alt="Twitter"/></a>
</div><div id="new2" class="smallAd" style="height:90px;">
<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mike-shanta/49/993/b17" target="_blank"><img src="http://yourspiritmindandbody.com/wp-content/themes/socrates/images/Linkedin.png" alt="LinkedIn"/></a>
</div><div id="new3" class="smallAd" style="height:90px;">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourSpiritMindAndBody" target="_blank"><img src="http://yourspiritmindandbody.com/wp-content/themes/socrates/images/RSS.png" alt="RSS"/></a>
</div><div id="new4" class="smallAd" style="height:90px;">
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/YourSpiritMindAndBody" target="_blank"><img src="http://yourspiritmindandbody.com/wp-content/themes/socrates/images/Facebook.png" alt="Facebook"/></a>
</div>
</div>
(3:05:03pm)Mike:Ok, I believe what you are saying, but don't really understand. I am very much not a techie person. What do I need to do to make it so it shows up on my sidebar and when people click on the Feed Me on top they can sign up?
(3:06:23pm)John M.:You will likely need to talk to the theme's developer about why that code is not displaying. Unfortunately since the code is outputted, it is a design issue more than anything. I can tell you that it is buried in a commented area called TOP ADS that does not appear to display at all for your theme.

[Dan Nickerson]

That's a crazy conversation. A hostgator tech should know the theme does not affect a wordpress feed. The image links are irrelevant. The problem is something, most likely a plugin is effecting your feed.

There is nothing in Socrates code that could affect the feed and as you stated. Switching to another theme doesn't solve the problem as you said.

Deactivate all your plugins and see if the feed restores, if so, reactivate one by one until you find the culprit.

And check out this link
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/rss-feed-blank

[mdshanta]

Hey Dan,

Well, I followed what you said and deactivated all the plug ins and my RSS feed started working. I narrowed it down to Advanced Permalinks as the culprit. What I don't understand though is why it worked fine until I loaded the Socrates theme. To be honest, I'm not even sure all of what that plug in does, but hope not having it won't mess me up. Thanks for your help, and although I can't get it to show up on my side bar yet, it seems like it works.

[Dan Nickerson]

It had to be a coincidence. There's nothing in Socrates that could affect the RSS feed.. It could have been a weird conflict with the plugin and Socrates, but since you said the feed didn't work with the default theme either, we know that's not the case.

Just make click all your inbound links and make sure there are no 404'.. if so, there's probably no issues in deactivating it.