Feedburner is the devil. When I first started the imbroglio back in 2006 I decided to run the RSS feed through Feedburner. I have no memory of why I did that or what advantage I thought I was gaining. I suspect it provided a way for me to see who was subscribed, number of subscribers, that sort of thing. Whatever the case, that decision has haunted me for years.
Feedburner is now some sort of shell of its former self. You can log in, but there’s basically nothing there. The problem is that Feedburner will not stop redirecting the feed from theimbrogl
io.com in a way that makes it completely unusable. I don’t know for sure when it stopped working, but over the last decade I tried multiple times to reinstall WordPress at theimbroglio.com to see if I could get a new RSS feed with a fresh install. I coudln’t. No matter what I did, if I installed WordPress at the root of this domain, the RSS feed for the blog would produce a 404 error. The feed should have been at theimbroglio.com/feed, but if you went there go there, it redirected immediately to http://feeds.feedburner.com/theimbroglio, which would give an 404 error.
I tried everything I could think of to fix this problem. At one point in 2024 ago I was able to login to Feedburner and delete the “proxies” there, but nothing changed. I could not make Feedburner release my feed! While there may be little consensus on the definition of a blog, one thing seems certain: You don’t have a blog without an RSS feed. I didn’t have a blog for years at least in part because of Feedburner. I could not make it die!
I suspected if I put the whole WordPress install, and therefore the blog itself, in a new directory, the feed would work again. Apparently, that theory was correct, which is why this blog is now at theimbroglio.com/blog instead of at theimbroglio.com. But I also did something else I guess I had never tried — I deleted everything from the root directory at theimbroglio.com. Maybe there was something hidden in a file there that was redirecting the feed? I don’t know. (I checked the .htaccess file; that wasn’t it. Obviously I don’t really understand what I’m doing and just making it up as I go along.)
What matters is I now have a blog with a feed. It appears to be discoverable by RSS readers, such as Reeder. And, finally, the old feed location (theimbroglio.com/feed) no longer redirects anywhere. I think I finally killed Feedburner for this site.
*sigh* Blog and long and prosper.