Just when I thought I was getting the hang of writing and scheduling posts, I run into WP Reader problems. As in, my post published as scheduled but did not show up in the reader.
Did you know that if you used more than 15 tags and categories (combined), WordPress won’t show your post in Reader? None of the how-to guides mentioned that! 😫
I just scheduled my post, which happens to be the first excerpt I ever posted of Born Not Made (as if that wasn’t nerve-wrecking enough). Then, when the time came, the app kept saying it was still scheduled after it was supposed to post, but the website said it posted. So at first, I didn’t know if the problem was that it wasn’t showing in the Reader or that it just didn’t post.
So I un-published it and re-published it because I figured if there was an error that might fix it. But it still didn’t show at all in the Reader, and the whole time I’m trying to figure it out, no one who might’ve read it could even see it in the list.
Finally, I found the help section and got information about it. Turns out, I had 1 tag too many. Or 1 category too many, depending on how you look at it. And for that, the whole post got screwed up. Man, that was frustrating!
Apparently, spammers will include a bunch of tags that have nothing to do with the post, and WordPress claims that “most posts will only need a few” or that only a few will actually be related to the post. Well, that sure isn’t true of fiction excerpts! I could use at least 20 and have all of them be relevant because books aren’t about 1 or 2 topics.
Plus, there’s the genre and the fact that it’s a new work. It’s really easy to come up with plenty of tags that are actively related to the post. And if that’s such a problem, why can’t they have a warning message pop up or something? They sure have them for enough other things.
*sigh*
I’m sure I got my hopes too high about people reading my writing (I thought at least a couple of people would like it), but to have no one be able to see it at all was majorly frustrating. I really hope the rest of the week goes better!
Savannah Knightly 