What JD did next

So I haven't written anything here on The Engine Room since last summer. That's because I've been working on a new site, Cathedral City Guide.

Why? Well, I was keen to build something in WordPress; my day job had moved almost totally away from subbing; and I wanted a new challenge. Most of all, my partner and I had visited half a dozen of England's medieval cathedral cities and we felt that collectively they deserved a website of their own.

I probably won't be updating The Engine Room in the foreseeable future but equally I'm not going to delete it. Thanks for all your photos, comments and emails - they were much appreciated.

Feel free to visit me at Cathedral City Guide or @cathedralcities on Twitter.

Why The Engine Room is a little quiet at the moment

For the past few months I've had an idea brewing for a new site/blog (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the two), and I'm just starting to turn it into reality using WordPress. This is my first experience with WordPress, so even if my idea turns out to be a stinker at least I'll have learned something new.

I don't want to go into too many details just yet, but when I have something halfway complete then I'll share it here. In the meantime, I might blog a little less frequently - but that doesn't mean I'll appreciate your comments and contributions any less.

Giving The Engine Room a polish

As you've probably noticed, I'm in the middle of updating The Engine Room's template. Please bear with me as it might take me a few days to iron out the kinks and restore all the widgets (especially the blogroll).

Thanks - and I hope you like the new look.

So my blog was loading slowly: blame FeedBurner

Anyone visiting this blog in the past couple of days will have noticed it loading incredibly slowly. Everything's back to normal now, but I thought I'd just explain what the problem was and how I fixed it.

(I realise this won't be of interest to most of The Engine Room's regular readers; I'm just hoping I can help one or two other bloggers out there.)

I use FeedBurner to manage the blog's feed. As a result of Google buying FeedBurner way back in 2007, all FeedBurner users have recently had to move their feed from a feeds.feedburner.com address to a new feeds2.feedburner.com address.

For me, this happened without incident and I thought no more of it. Google promised that anyone going to the old address would be automatically redirected to the new one, and for a few months this was the case.

Then last week, I noticed that the blog was loading incredibly slowly - at least 10 seconds per post. The feed itself seemed fine, and FeedBurner's FeedBulletin reported no problems.

After trying lots of measures such as pinging FeedBurner, resynching the feed and even changing the blog template, all to no avail, I finally discovered that my old FeedBurner feed address was no longer working. Could this be connected?

In short, yes. I was using FeedBurner's FeedFlare service to add functionality to my feed - it's what puts the links such as 'Share on Facebook' at the bottom of each post. The FeedFlare html code I'd added to my blog template ages back was referencing my old FeedBurner feed, not the new one, and so as soon as the old feed address stopped working, it brought my whole blog grinding to a halt.

The solution was simple: log back into FeedBurner, get the new FeedFlare html code, and place this in the blog template instead of the old code. I just wish I hadn't had to work it out for myself. And for anyone out there suffering the same problem: it isn't enough just to disable FeedFlare. You have to change the code in your template.

I don't know whether the old feed address is permanently dead, and if so, whether it has cost me any subscribers, but I do know that the Google/Blogger/FeedBurner technical support is rubbish. You can't email anyone for an answer: instead, you have to post a message on the relevant help group and hope for the best. Bah.

• The Engine Room's new, working feed

From old FeedBurner to new Google FeedBurner...

I use FeedBurner to manage The Engine Room's feed, and as a result of Google buying FeedBurner a while back I've just had to move the feed to a new address.

Google promises that anyone going to the old address will be automatically redirected, so even if you read The Engine Room in a feed reader you won't have to do anything.

However if you are a perfectionist like me, you might want to subscribe to the new feed rather than the old one. The new address is:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/blogspot/engineroom

If you have any problems with any of this, let me know. I probably won't be able to help, but at least I'll know. And if this whole post means nothing to you, have a cup of tea and relax.

The Engine Room, Alexa and Canadians

According to Alexa's traffic rankings, The Engine Room is now one of the top million websites in the world:



However, Alexa also says that 66.7% of our traffic comes from Canada (not true!), so I'm not sure how much faith I put in it...

Line breaks and Blogger

Hmm. Spotted something odd with Blogger.

If you leave one blank line after a blockquote in a Blogger post (ie two line breaks), that one blank line isn't displayed when you 'Show Original Post' in the Comments section for that post. In other words, the bottom (but not the top) of the blockquote butts up against the rest of the copy, as this picture shows:



However if you leave two blank lines after a blockquote (three line breaks), the 'Show Original Post' option shows one blank line between the blockquote and the rest of the copy, and everything is dandy. Admittedly, you now have two blank lines under the pullquote in the post itself, but that isn't as confusing as having no blank lines at all in 'Show Original Post'.

The same holds true for a [Photo].

Is this just my blog/template/setup? And is it worth going back and adding an extra line break to all my posts?

Happy birthday to The Engine Room

It's exactly a year since I wrote the first post on The Engine Room, so I suppose today is the blog's first birthday. Happy birthday to us!


In that time, Apus and I have written 353 posts; we've had 19,477 hits (not including those from our own good selves); and we've made $10.60 in advertising revenue from AdSense. Hey, that's nearly enough to buy ourselves a beer each! I think we've earnt it.

Without being too cheesy, thanks to everyone who has helped, commented, made suggestions, sent in articles and emails, linked to us or just acknowledged our existence.

Oh, and seeing as it's the blog's birthday, I thought you might be interested to see our current top five Google searches (ie the ones where people actually click through to us). I've linked them to the posts in question:

• how many is several

• diarise

• what happens if you pick up a penguin

• sophie ellis bextor naked

• english collective nouns production quiz

The last one seems a bit specific. I'm surprised many people are Googling that exact phrase!