Ok,  this is a little crazy.  You see I chose FeedBurner for my syndication (RSS) feed from my blog and I’ve tried my best to set it up correctly on the FeedBurner web site and also on my Blog.  I use DasBlog so all I had to do was fill in the name of my FeedBurner feed on the configuration page of my web site.

So I did that and was on my merry way setting up my feed in feed burner and checking out all the cool features that FeedBurner provides for tracking your subscribers and other data about your feed.  I thought things were going great.  I began happily writing blog posts and expecting all these people to come flocking to my site and subscribe to my RSS feed.

However,  there was one thing that I forgot.  What’s that you ask?  Well, simple, subscribe to my own feed.  This was an important step and one I should not have left out.  Because today I did that and it failed.  UGH!  

Let me explain a bit more.  You see I clicked the RSS feed link in the header of my blog.  Yep that orange and white one right there in the header.  Since I use Outlook as my RSS reader I expected the next popup to appear asking me if I wanted to add this feed to outlook.  

And it did.

Not paying too close attention, I went on my merry way and clicked “Yes” because that’s what I wanted to do, add it.  Except, what I was adding, wasn’t what I thought I was adding.  What?!?  Ok, take a look at my next screen shot you’ll see that there are, what appear to be, some Asian characters.  Wait a minute.  That’s not what I added (see what I mean).   

How did that happen and how can I fix it?  But I don’t know where to start.  My Blog? IE? Feed Burner? Outlook?  So many places that could fail, so many places to look. 

Calming down a bit I determine that first goal should be to get it working right.  How can all my horde mass large group of (ok it’s just 3) subscribers get to my blog?  How will they survive without being able to read my blog?  I have to do something and do it quick.  So I begin trying to track the problem. 

I started by taking a look closer at that “Add a Feed” dialog that Outlook threw up at me.  First glance it looks ok, but wait, what’s with that URL?  Why is there “HTTP://http:/”?  That’s strange, but it gets even stranger.  Take a look at the “Advanced…” dialog.  Again it’s showing the Asian characters and also the description tells me it’s definitely a different RSS Feed but the URL is mine, or pretty close.  I don’t even know who this Yario is (I’m sure he’s a great guy, after all he blogs and does it about technology, how great is that).  If I could read these characters I’m sure I’d enjoy his posts, but I didn’t have the time today to learn a new language so I press on trying to figure this problem out.

I’m still pondering that double http thing and it sure doesn’t look right.   So let’s go back to my blog and check out the configuration and see if I did something wrong. 

Everything looks fine in the blog configuration and I have the right feed name in the text box.  So let’s try and just see if Explorer can bring it up, by going back to the blog and right clicking the RSS icon and selecting “Open in a New Tab”.  The new tab opens and it directly sends me over to Outlook and prompts me again.  This time I cancel (clicked ‘No’) out of the dialog, since I’ve already looked at that.  I instead go back to IE to see what the URL is in the address box.   Hmmm.  It looks ok to me here.  But this is important information because that tells me that my blog is building the URL right, especially since I told it to prefix the syndication links with “feed://”.

Turning the “Use feed scheme…” feature off does help by allowing the Feed Burner page to be displayed, but the real problem isn’t fixed.  

Right now I’m a little stumped and not sure where else to go.   Here are some of my ideas. First, this problem, most likely, isn’t with the DasBlog software since I believe it is building the URL correctly.  That leaves either IE or Outlook as the source of the problem.  Unfortunately for me and you, my friend, I am out of time right now.  However I promise, I will dig a little deeper into this with my friends Bing and Google and we will see what we can discover.  Who knows, someone else might have already solved this little problem.  So, you’ll have to excuse me for little bit, while I go do my other job (being a husband and dad).  But don’t worry, I’ll be back on the case soon.

Till then!  Enjoy the day!

P.S.  If you have any insight on this, throw me a comment.