A couple of weeks ago I wrote with some satisfaction about my successful conversion from Blogger to WordPress. The new important features in WordPress 2.6.2 are truly impressive, and the Blogger entries and comments came in without a hitch, even down to the permalink names.

I should have known it was too good to be true. I noticed this week that none of my recent entries were showing up in my RSS feed. Checking out the WordPress settings, I discovered that my site didn’t even have an RSS feed. Feed queries were returning a 403 error code, which means a security access violation. Trolling the WordPress message boards turned up that problems like this can only be addressed by the hosting provider, and GoDaddy doesn’t troubleshoot applications.

I tried exporting my blog using WordPress’s wonderful XML export utility. That went fine. The trouble was that the file exceeded the 2MB import limit. I had to scrounge up a way to change that (not a big deal, actually, involving a minor change to php.ini) and test a new install of WordPress and uploading my XML file. That went fine. Ultimately, I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling WordPress and reloading my blog. Then I had to rebuild by sidebar, change the header image and reburn my feed.

Long story short, this consumed a good four to six hours of time between troubleshooting and restoring. Feedburner now says I have a working RSS feed. We’ll see. I’m hoping this item shows up in it, along with the dozen or so other extries that subscribers haven’t seen over the last two weeks.

One of these days I’m going to hire me an IT person!