Feeds, internet addresses and generous facilitators

Last night, I was challenged with fixing my blog's feed and sent out an SOS on the facilitating online course newsgroup.  Chris Woodhouse from the UK immediately offered to talk to me on Skype to help sort out the technicalities and we set the time for early this morning my time, which was in the evening for Chris.  I uploaded a new subscription chicklet using Feedburner in the meantime to see if that would fix the problem.  I still had my old version of the subscription button on the page because I was interested to see if Chris could help me figure out what I'd done wrong.

Lisa Barrett, another course participant, rang from South Australia to see if she could help. We had a lovely conversation, which of course, drifted off to midwifery. Anyone who knows midwives would recognise that the drift to midwifery topics is inevitable when midwives communicate in any medium. This morning, I bounded out of bed, ready for my Skype call with Chris, checked the emails and there was a response from Claire Thompson from Canada suggesting that the problem lies with the blog feed address. Claire had kindly tried to reinsert the feed address and the reader wouldn't let her. The subscription box wouldn't let her subscribe either. At that point, I decided to delete the old subscription button and see what happened from there.

The Skype call with Chris was great. We went back and forth from the edited Wiki participants' page to my blog, with Chris talking me through various scenarios. Very quickly, Chris identified the problem. The address on the Wiki was different to the feedburner address. Chris explained how to hover over the chiklet and right click the mouse to bring up the copy link function.  Chris then reopened the Wiki participants' page and pasted the link into the list, replacing the previous information.

Brilliant! The links to my blog on the participants' Wiki page are now functional.  Anyone can now subscribe to my blog.  I'm doing the happy dance :-)



Thanks so much to Chris, Lisa and Claire for their kindness and help. I getting to really appreciate this online community.