Confusion regarding newsfeeds

Hello all,
I posted something like this recently. However, when I did a search on the forums and used my userid in the search box, several recent postings to the forums were not showing up at all. I found a bunch of my postings by doing this search but not the most recent and not a few others. I guess I can add tags below, including my name and see if that helps me find my postings. Any other tips please? Is there a way to get an email when someone comments on your forum posting?
Ok, my question is regarding news feeds on my blog. I was having trouble with my feedburner tools. I had redirected my feeds to feedburner and setup the Email Subscription thing. Just today, I finally started getting emails. Also, what is strange, is that the url to my feed is now working, also. Why was it not working earlier and now it is? The last time I put in my feed url, into Flock Browser (based on Firefox) and Firefox browser, it did not find anything at the url. In particular, I used my feed url defined like this:
http://wsmagazine.net/words/feed/
where we have domain: wsmagazine.net, /words/ folder containing blog. Now, it pulls up the most recent postings.
I did have to recreate this blog because I had problems on that domain. So, I did try to recreate it the same exact way, on the same domain, in the same directory on the domain. I put in the same information into the blog to define my feedburner feed.
What might make it not work for so long and then suddenly it starts working? Both the feed and the Emails from feedburner are now working. Like magic it got fixed.
I did a search on wordpress and these kinds of things with feedburner. I didn’t find anyone saying that this or that was why it was happening. Somehow, in those postings, they said things started working again, but we are never told what to do to make them work right and what one might not have done previously to make things work.
Any ideas anyone?
Bruce