
Image by rudolf_schuba via FlickrI didn’t exactly blog about it outright, but I do remember expressing a reasonable amount of uncertainty when I announced that I moved my FeedBurner account to Google’s servers. Yes I am an early adopter; the deadline may not be until the end of February, but do you really want to make something of it? Apparently Google did.
As part of the migration process, I had to ask the DNS administrator for swrobotics.com (I wish I could do things like this myself, but I can’t) to change the entry for the feeds subdomain from feeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com. — the easy-peasy old way — to <special-sub-sub-sub-domain>.feedproxy.ghs.google.com. — the (unnecessarily, I think) long new way.
The change seemed like a simple matter, and indeed I was emailed back the next day with a note that the modification was complete. Google, though, seems to have a glitch. Trying to access the feed at its usual home (feeds.swrobotics.com/swrobotics) turned up an error: “404 Server Not Found”.
Research I did tonight turned up a thread on Google Groups with a solution to the annoying 404 Server Not Found errors I was getting. Apparently there are widespread issues with preexisting MyBrand (what FeedBurner’s Custom Domain feature is referred to as) domain configurations. The easy solution is to deactivate the MyBrand service and re-enter the settings. Seconds after I implemented this fix, I was pulling up the feed once more.
So the moral of the story is, don’t trust that automatic migration tools like FeedBurner’s will fix everything up exactly right. Sometimes, hacks, kludges, and/or workarounds will be necessary to make sure things work properly.