Deborah Woehr

A big thanks goes to Marti and Scot for testing out my feed. I spent over half of yesterday trying to figure out what caused the problem, which actually began before I left for vacation. I started seeing the feeds for this blog, the blog I had on my main directory, and my “On Book Design” blog merge together. Not only was my RSS acting up, but I lost valuable pages on my other two blogs.

The root of the problem was a missing file on this blog, which I wasn’t aware of until I changed my permalinks structure. With the other blogs, I installed WordPress from Fantastico. But with this blog, I downloaded the program to my computer before uploading it to my server. For some reason, the .htaccess file disappears on Unix and Linux systems.

If your Cpanel is linux-based, check to see if that file is installed. If not, you need to create a new file and change its permissions to 666 so WordPress can automatically update it when you make a change to the permalinks structure or install a plugin that requires this file.

It’s also important if you’re going to be creating multiple blogs on one domain, like I did. Make sure each blog has that .htaccess file. I deleted most of the blogs and subdomains during the trail and error process of this fix.

I’ve kept my “On Book Design” blog, but will move it to its own domain because readers have shown an interest in it. That’s on my To-Do list for next week. Right now, my novel is screaming for my attention.