Like many others in the Lotus community, I’m a big user of of both Domino-based blogs (DominoBlog in my case, but I believe Blogsphere is also affected) and Feedburner.
I send all my blog content, comment and aggregated feeds through Feedburner in order to have some freedom to move the blogs around, to change settings and above all, to be able to track subscriptions and manage podcast content. It’s a good service, though like others that Google has acquired over the years seems to have fallen into something of a lull in terms of new features.
However, they clearly have not stopped making changes altogether as this last week I’d started to see a number of complaints from folks on Twitter that were getting 404 errors when trying to access the blog posts linked from Twitterfeed tweets, e.g:
When I checked out a few of the posts in question, and expanded the shortened links, I was seeing URLs like these:
http://foundationsblog.com/blog/foundations.nsf/dx/ibm-to-host-lotus-foundations-servers-in-uk-forum-locations?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foundationsblog+(The+Foundations+Blog)&utm_content=FeedBurner
The first portion of these links resolved just fine, i.e. http://foundationsblog.com/blog/foundations.nsf/dx/ibm-to-host-lotus-foundations-servers-in-uk-forum-locations, but the second half (after ?utm_source=) was causing the Domino server to reject the request (HTTP Web Server: Unknown Command Exception). After a bit of an investigation it turned out that this is a new feature that Feedburner has introduced as a default on all its feeds:
The ability to “Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics” causes this ‘corruption’ to the URLs provided in the feed, and thus to the browser errors users have seen. To fix the issue, just go into each of your Feedburner feeds and disable this option. This is somewhat of a shame because I have always wanted to be able to track RSS feeds better than I can today, but I’m sure that can wait!
Hope this helps somebody else – if you use Feedburner for your feeds, it’s worth checking them ASAP.
