P.S. I searched pretty thoroughly in these archives and didn’t get any helpful answers, either. If feeds aren’t a huge area of knowledge here, are there any recommended forums for those who have feed questions? Thanks.
Auto-discovery is a function of what’s in your header. Edit your header.php and reorder the feeds there.
Thanks. Only thing is, my Atom feed doesn’t show up in my header, which is very perplexing, so I can’t move it to the bottom. I appreciate your reply, though!
moenkopi: If your feed is not in the header of the page, then it’s not auto-discovered. I’d suggest you re-examine what you are looking at, because you’re not making any sense.
Okay. Here’s the deal, Otto. I’ve examined it many times, and I know what I see. My Atom feed is not listed in my header, and yet Bloglines and other programs using auto-discovery are finding it. I can’t find the code for my Atom feed anywhere in my site, and it yet it is updated every time I update my feed. Unless Atom feeds are listed in some weird way that doesn’t, for example, use the word “Atom” in them, then I’m at a total loss. And, no, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but I’m explaining it as well as I can. So why are Bloglines and other sites picking up my Atom feed, and why is it being updated every time I publish, if it’s not anywhere in my template? Where is it, then?
The fact of the matter is that auto-discovery looks in the header of the page for the feeds. That’s how it works. If you don’t have the feed on the page, no sort of “autodiscovery” will ever find it.
Now, if some aggregator site is finding your atom feed regardless of the fact that it’s not in your header anymore, then perhaps they have the location of your feed cached from when you DID have the atom feed listed in the header. Who says that bloglines is still performing auto-discovery of your feeds? Most likely, they know where your feeds are already, and aren’t bothering to try to find them again, because they can still get the feed.
In your case, I’d just disable the atom feed entirely. Add this to the very top of the wp-atom.php file:
<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
exit;
?>
Now it’ll return 404 when they ask for your atom feed.
As for why it’s “being updated every time you publish”, you’re misunderstanding how the feed system works. It’s not updating anything when you publish, the feed is built at the moment you request it, using the info in your blog directly. The feed is not like a file on the server somewhere, in the same way that your blog’s HTML is not a file on the server. It’s all dynamically generated.
Okay, the cache makes sense. Thank you for the explanation. It’s the first I’ve seen it explained that way. As for disabling the atom feed, I still have subscribers on it, and I don’t want them to be stranded. I wish I’d discovered this before I had subscribers to that feed. Oh, well.
Thanks!
Hi guys, I’ve got some relative question.
I’ve just burnt a FeedBurner feed for my blog. When I’m trying to add my blog to my Bloglines account, I also have the choice between three feeds: Rss, Atom, and FeedBurner.
My question is: is there any way to remove RSS and Atom as choices, so that any Blogline user can only choose the default feed, FeedBurner?
Thanks in advance for any help.
