Design Blog - Design Blog - Farnborough web design

Last weekend I couldn't log in to Blogger under my old username & password, I kept being redirected to the new Blogger login page. Whether it was a quirk of cookies, my machine or blogger forcing me to upgrade, I don't know but I was desperate to post quickly so, until I moved to new blogger, I couldn't porogress. So I signed up.

This other blog site is hosted on its own server with its own domain name and simply uses blogger as the tool to publish the articles there. The Atom XML feed has always been at the path http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml

And yet I noticed in one forum that uses that exact xml feed path that the "Recent blog:" link displayed next to my profile on every post I made is pointing to blogger.com/feeds... I checked my control panel and the path is http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml... yet viewing my profile and posts the link is blogger.com/feeds...

With numerous links to my feed and my site, my domain has accumulated, since 2004, a reasonable amount of InBound Links (IBLs) which may or may not have helped with both traffic and a reasonable PageRank... PR5 for a personal blog.

Recently my PR has gone down from PR5 to PR4 and the number of IBLs has gone down by over 150... I suspect it may have something to do with the feed now pointing to blogger.com/feeds rather than http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml

Whatever has happened I'm a little annoyed at losing links, annoyed at losing PR and annoyed that MY links to MY feed are hijacked by blogger which uses it's own URL and not mine.

Looking at the page source of my blog I see a new format for the feeds. So here's the new lines that blogger places within the <body> tags of my blog and not within the head...

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="My Domain - Atom" href="http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Domain - RSS" href="http://www.mydomain.com/rss.xml" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="My Domain - Atom" href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xxxxxxx/posts/default" />

It seems to be this new service.post that's getting all the links.

I've been good to Google and stuck with Blogger despite all the time outs, down time etc... but maybe it's time to move on... I really do like WordPress and the other WordPress sites I run have caused me no trouble like this at all over the last few years... and if I want the xml feed to MY domain I'm sure WordPress will b ehappy to allow me to do so...

I'm off to do some experimenting, I'll report back my findings.

And if anybody knows any workarounds or hacks for this problem please let us know and we'll share it here :)

Labels: blogger, blogging, CMS, tools, xml, xml feeds

Wordpress 2.0.9 & 2.1.1

Blogger Hijacks XML feeds