Wordle of my blog posts

I think I’m coming a bit late to this party, but I found a web app called Wordle.

You give it some text or a link to an RSS feed and it makes a tag cloud out of it.  A tag cloud is a way of displaying a bunch of words where the words that appear more frequently are larger.

Wordle has a lot of options for how to color the words, the font and whether to arrange them vertically, horizontally or both.

A word cloud for the RSS feed of my website is attached to this post.  I don’t think that’s a true representation of the text of my blog – it only seems to include the most recent posts, possibly because of limitations of FeedBurner.

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Image via CrunchBase

I tried FeedBurner back in the days when this blog was running Blogger, but I never really saw the point and I didn’t have any subscribers anyway.  Since then I switched to WordPress and FeedBurner was bought by Google, so I gave it another shot.

I’ve been using it for a while now, with mixed results.  The stats are inaccurate to the point where they seem random (and weren’t stats the original point?), their whole website is dreadfully slow, and there was no easy way to switch everyone over from the direct feed to the burned one.

Then today I read about a WordPress plugin called FeedBurner FeedSmith, which (somehow) takes care of that exact problem.  Hooray!

And then I noticed that the FeedBurner feed wasn’t working at all.  I checked Google Reader and sure enough, it hadn’t had a blog post in two weeks!  And I’ve been posting every day!  And although I have FeedMedic alerts set up, I never got one.

The FeedBurner feed was showing this error:

Error getting URL: 502 - Source feed is too large … maximum size is 512K

Which is fairly self-explanatory I suppose, but it still took a while to fix.  First of all I lowered the number of posts that WordPress sends to the feed from 500 down to 10.  Although that should bring down the feed size drastically, I was still getting the error.  It turns out that the trick is to ping FeedBurner so it actually tries getting your feed again rather than just showing you the error from the last time it tried.

So in the end all is well with the world.

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