About Wildlife Photographic Blog

How does WPB Work?

Wildlfe Photography Blog is an RSS aggregator for wildlife blogs. It regularly checks the registered blogs for new posts and includes these into its own feed. If you want more detail see the technical notes!

My entry has not yet appeared!

Feed propagation is not instant. Feeds may well be cached by the publishing application (eg blogger or wordpress). WPB also caches entries, checking for updates on regular cycle. My aim is to cache each feed hourly, however, this may be reviewed if volumes increase. See the technical notes for more details.

My photos look odd!

Recent blog entries may be served before their photographs have been cached. In this case to prevent large images from overflowing the column, WPB uses CSS to dynamically resize the image in the browser. This can result in a photo looking either over-sharp or slightly blurry. Generally speaking new images will be cached within an hour or so of publication, after this they are served directly from the cache and should look much better. If you still think your images look odd contact me and I'll look into it.

My photos don't appear at all

Several possible reasons here. Firstly some blog systems don't publish the image addresses in the RSS, so WPB can't see the images. Secondly, some blog systems do publish the addresses but wrapped in a way that SimplePie cannot see them. Thirdly some images are too large and can crash my caching routines so are excluded.

My entries are no longer appearing on WPB

Please check your RSS is valid (use the W3C RSS Validator to check this). If it fails this then WPB will struggle to process it. If it passes this and I'll look into it for you.

Only my most recent entry occurs on the contributor list!

That is correct. To keep the contributor list simple it only shows the most recent entry from each contributor.

I only see three entries from my blog in the main list!

Again that is correct. The intention of WPB is not to republish every entry from every blog in perpuity, but rather to drive traffic to your blog. For that reason I only hold and show the three most recent entries from each feed. This also serves to level the playing field slightly for those blogs which publish less frequently, by ensuring that the feed is not overrun by the more prolific blogs.

Why are category labels not clickable on some entries

Category labels are clickable for blogs that are known to be powered by Blogger. I haven't found a generic way of getting Wordpress category links to work for all feeds. Any Wordpress gurus out there?

Can I remove a blog from WPB?

Currently there is no way for blog owners to remove feeds, however, if you email me I can set the feed to archived and it will no longer appear.

Why have you declined my blog?

It doesn't mean I don't think your blog is good, interesting or worthy. It simply means I don't feel it to be a reasonable fit with WPB. Blogs will be declined if they do not regularly feature wildlife photography (not just snapshots!), if I can't find a visible link to WPB or if it appears to me that they are being registered by someone who does not own them.

I've seen a campaign called WPB in Google Analytics. What is this?

WPB adds campaign tracking codes to its URLs to help track the impact it is making. For more details see the page on Analytics

WPB tweets my entries as if they are its own

As far as possible I try and credit tweets obviously, however, 140 characters is quite a limit. You can help this by placing your twitter name in your profile (and by having clear blog title!)