Hotlink Protection And Rss Feeds

**Kathy_P** · March 7, 2006

Last week I enabled hotlink protection. After that I noticed that Bloglines.com (the online feed aggregator) displayed an error next to my feed. Over the weekend I made two entries to my blog, and neither one was picked up by Bloglines. In an attempt to figure out if the problem was at my end or their end, I subscribed to my own feed using Thunderbird's built-in feed reader, and it picked up the two blog entries that I wrote after enabling hotlink protection. But I contacted Garden Voices, a reblogger that sends a lot of desirable traffic my way, and she told me that she is no longer getting my feed. She tried to re-subscribe to it, but it told her she was already subscribed.

Here is a copy of the part of my .htaccess file that was added when I enabled hotlink protection:

>RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://coldclimategardening.com/.*$	  [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://coldclimategardening.com$	  [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://weblog.coldclimategardening.com/.*$	  [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://weblog.coldclimategardening.com$	  [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.coldclimategardening.com/.*$	  [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.coldclimategardening.com$	  [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.weblog.coldclimategardening.com/.*$	  [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.weblog.coldclimategardening.com$	  [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

Is there something missing or extraneous in there that would be causing problems, or should I look elsewhere?

**TCH-Tim** · March 7, 2006

Offhand I wouldn't think it should be a problem. I used to have hotlink protection enabled and never had feed problems, and the stuff above looks normal.

Do you have hotlink protection turned on right now? Can see your feed just fine at the moment.

**Kathy_P** · March 7, 2006

Yes, I have it turned on right now. If you can see it just fine, then there must be some other problem. I will send an email to Bloglines. Thanks for the reassurance.

**TCH-Tim** · March 7, 2006

Correction. I can see your Atom feed (/atom.xml) just fine using Firefox's Live Bookmarks. It's up to date.

But Bloglines is looking at your RSS feed (/index.xml), which hasn't been updated since Feb. 5th. There's no problem accessing the RSS feed, it just doesn't have the most current information. Might want to check out your RSS settings and the file permissions on index.xml.

Doesn't look like a hotlinking issue anyway.

**Kathy_P** · March 7, 2006

I sent an email to Bloglines. Hadn't thought to check the feed urls myself. I can load them all in my browser. So whatever is going on, I need more information to troubleshoot it. You might be checking the wrong feed at Bloglines, though, because it has certainly been updated since Feb. 5th.

http://www.coldclimategardening.com/wp-rss.php

http://www.coldclimategardening.com/wp-rss2.php

http://www.coldclimategardening.com/wp-rdf.php

http://www.coldclimategardening.com/wp-atom.php

The last post I saw in Bloglines was dated Feb. 28th.