DeafRead Bloggers: Check Feed Status
 | By Tayler Mayer Saturday, January 13th, 2007 |
We are asked a lot if a blogger’s blog feed is working or not. Now there is an easy way for bloggers to check the status of their blog’s feed, either as “working” or “temporarily unavailable”. The new addition appears on DeafRead Profiles. Here’s an example page. Look for it under DeafRead Active Posts and Active Total Views statistics.
If your blog profile shows “temporarily unavailable”, it doesn’t mean it’s broken on our end. There are two possibilities: 1) your blog may be temporarily down. 2) There is a special character in your feed that is causing it to be unreadable.
If your blog is up and running, then the next step is to check for special character problems in your feed by clicking “Validate” next to the words “Temporarily unavailable”. Analyze the output at FeedValidator.org to learn why your feed may not be working, particularly where the special character is. If FeedValidator.org says your feed is valid, that is when you alert us! 
Oftentimes, special characters will appear as a space in your blog. When the webpage doesn’t know how to interpret a special character, they are often represented as a space. Try deleting it, and replace it with a space using your spacebar.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Hi Tayler
Oh dear! We can see that your example of the temporarily unavailable blog is our blog at Alternative Solutions Center, smile. We are truly sorry if you did get many requests about our blog’s status, but we are glad that you have come up with a neat solution. We don’t know how long our site will be down. Unfortunately, we are dealing with an inept web host. We have signed up to work with DeafVision, but a lot of things need to be ironed out before the transfer can be made. To our readers…we apologize for any inconvenience we have caused. Thanks for your patience!!
January 13th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Candace A McCullough, it’s no bother.
You’re not the only one asking about feed statuses. Actually, quite a few have been, so I hope this will help save time.
Looking forward to your blog’s resurrection!