Drupal and Feedburner

Feedburner seems to be working now. You can subscribe to Drupal Ace by RSS feed or subscribe to Drupal Ace by Email, either of which gets handled by Feedburner. 

What was the problem? As I mentioned last time, it was working fine when I set it up a few months ago, but later stopped. First culprit: Somewhere along the way, my setup at admin/build/feedburner lost the correct feed URL. How that happened I don't know, but obviously the wrong feed info makes for a Feedburner extinguisher.  

There was also a problem in the subscription process. I had been using the following Feedburner-provided code for the subscription block, which displayed an email input field and a "subscribe" button:

<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;" action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=DrupalAce', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><p>Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p><input type="hidden" value="DrupalAce" name="uri"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /><p>Delivered by <a href="http://feedburner.google.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p></form>

However, this code was breaking – parts of it just disappearing – very time I made any edit to the block. That means I was forgetting to use the proper input format, right? No; I checked and rechecked until I was silly, and was correctly using an unfiltered HTML format, which has worked fine in many similar tasks.

With one other exception: I had the same problem earlier with Google-provided search code. There, too, the code would break if I edited the block for any reason, despite use of an unfiltered HTML input format.

Why does this happen? I don't know. I expect that with an unfiltered input format, code should go into a block - and stay there - untouched. Yet for the two examples above, re-opening the block for editing would always reveal the code to have been stripped down to something shorter (and broken). Go figure.

Solution? I found shorter code that opens a subscription window, instead of a ready-to-go email input field and "Submit" button. It too does the job – see it in action toward the top of this page! – and doesn't fall apart when I re-open the block.

So. Once again, it's an unsatisfying ending of "I'm not sure what happened, but things are working again". That's not so bad – but if you have any insight into the breaking-block-code matter, please speak up. (Or if you see something else laughably wrong with this site's Feedburner setup.)