WordPress Gotcha! Don’t “Please Try Again” when “Save Draft” fails

October 14, 2009 By 14 Comments

(Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes)

WordPress just ate your homework.

Have you ever been merrily typing along, creating your next magnificent article, pressed the “Save Draft” button in your WordPress editing interface…

… and seen one of these?

Hit the Back button instead

Hit the Back button instead

You have two options, hit the “Back” button, or “Please Try Again” as directed by this page.

Do yourself a favor:


Hit the Back button.

Here’s the Gotcha! If you are saving a draft for the first time, using the “Please Try Again” link takes you back to an empty article! Nothing got saved. [Update: You may have an untitled draft in your queue. If this happens to you, and you get that empty text field, look back in the Edit Pages for an empty draft page.]

On the other hand, the Back button restores most of the state of the page before you attempted to “Save Draft.” You may lose the title, but your first title probably sucked anyway. Mine usually do. So that’s small loss.

Has this ever bit you? It may be a known bug. May not be. I haven’t looked, it’s faster to work around it for me. And makes for an excellent little article for you!

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: ,

WordPress Gotcha! Find Out If Your RSS Feed is Helping or Hurting

October 12, 2009 By 8 Comments

(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

Your blog’s Feedburner RSS feed won’t update. Do you know what to do? Josh Kohlbach does. Here’s what Josh has to say about the matter.

Feedburner icon

Feedburner icon


Here’s a WordPress Gotcha! that I stumbled across recently:

No matter how many times I pinged Feedburner, they wouldn’t update my feed with my latest articles.

After trying to ping my feed many times over with no success I took it a step further and tried to Resync my feed (generally something you do as a last resort according to FeedBurner) and it was then that I discovered what the real problem was.

My feed’s file size was too big!

I knew immediately that it would be some WordPress setting that I mistakenly set early on which was pushing my feed size up. But I really wanted to find out just how big it was.

How To Find Out Your Feed’s Size

A great way to find out how big your RSS feed has grown to is to check with Web-Sniffer’s handy little tool.

This basically allows you to check certain meta data about any website page you input, including RSS feeds – perfect!

To check this you’ll actually need the address that points to your original feed. For me (and most WordPress users) it was just a matter of adding /feed to the end of my site’s URL.

My feed size was just over 512kb which is quite a lot considering all that actually counts toward your feed’s file size is the text that features in your posts.

The Cause

After a little more searching around on the web I discovered that the average feed only stores between 10 and 25 full sized posts – even on the busiest blogs.

I checked my settings in WordPress under Settings->Reading and low and behold, I was storing over 150 backlogged posts in my RSS feed. Way too much – which explains the enormous size of my original RSS feed.

The Fix

I tapered this Syndication feeds setting back to 25 previous posts and pinged my feed using Feedburner’s ping tool. After that it updated all the posts that were “stuck” in the pipeline.

You gotta Gotcha? Wanna post it here on Website In A Weekend? Send it on along.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional freelance programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia. Josh's blog Code My Own Road is packed with small business tips and technical tutorials for Do-It-Yourself entrepreneurs.
Filed Under: Building community Tagged With: , ,
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