Are you using the A4Ubacks plugin as a way to promote your blog posts within the A4U community? Are you also using FeedBurner as a way to manage your RSS feed? If so then the chances are you’re in trouble as the two don’t like to play nicely together. Here’s the simple way to spot it and fix it.

What’s the problem?

Firstly let me explain why things might not be working for you and a way for you to identify if you might be suffering the same fate. Earlier today I was reading a blog post from Ray’s Befuddled blog. I thought it was worth of a vote so gave it a “back”. However the vote button didn’t work as expected and took me to the generic feeds page on A4U rather than the actual blog post page.

Curious as to why my vote didn’t register I checked one of my own blog posts, hit the vote button and the same thing happened. No vote, just redirected to the default A4U feeds page. Bugger!

Magical Duck Powers

I was now on some kind of voting mission so I popped over to Jason’s Blog, gave his latest post a vote and low and behold it worked! Were there magical Loquax powers at hand here or is it something that we’re both doing wrong?

It turns out the answer is a little less exciting than “mystical ducks” and much more geeky than I had imagined but I like a challenge so off I went to dig deeper.

Examining the same posts in my RSS feeder I noticed that there was a pattern with their URLs.

Ray’s post
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BefuddledMe/~3/BOQAKVCgHSM/

My Post
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fishandclicks/~3/KflmL8eCM3Y/

Jason’s post
http://www.onelittleduck.co.uk/advertising/dodge-duck-dip-dive-dodge-903.htm

Notice the Google redirects that appear in the first two but Jason’s is perfectly formatted? That’s the reason why the A4U voting system was not working correctly.

Tom Freeman who who built the original A4U plugin was kind enough to shed some light…

affiliates4u.com needs to match up the articles URL submitted in the feed with the actual website URL in order for it to associate the two and register a vote.

Now it made perfect sense why the vote wasn’t registering, after all the two URL’s below don’t look anything like each other but do in fact point to the same place.

A4U version
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fishandclicks/~3/KflmL8eCM3Y/

My Version
http://www.fishandclicks.co.uk/affiliate-event-260309/

So how do you fix it?

Well, in short you need to turn off the redirects that FeedBurner creates in your RSS feed. These redirects are needed to create a few stats but nothing that I consider important. I manily use FeedBurner to record the number of subscribers but that’s about it. Plus I feel clean URLs in my RSS feed will be much more beneficial in the long run

You can switch of redirects by simply by following these instructions:

• Login to your FeedBurner account
• Choose the feed you want to edit
• Under the Analyze tab, click on “Configure Stats”
• Uncheck ‘Item Link Clicks’ shown in the screenshot and save it.

Done.

Unfortunately it won’t fix all your old posts imported into A4U but when you create a new blog post things should be working fine again.

Thanks