I am not sure exactly what changed within WordPress 2.8.4 to cause this but for a large segment of my readers there might not have been any visible updates on RSS feeds since around 6th September.

I wasn’t experiencing the problem, as email subscriptions to my own feed, and Google Reader subscriptions were not affected, because these pull directly from my feed on Feedburner which was being updated.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites

However, some RSS readers and feed aggregators actually behave themselves and subscribe to the feed exactly as it appears in my header.

http://andybeard.eu/feed

Unfortunately, those feed readers haven’t been able to access my feed, caught in some kind of broken redirection loop that I haven’t had time to fully diagnose… but it is fixed now.

I don’t know which of the plugins is really the culprit…

• If I remove a feed redirect from Feedburner Feedsmith, the original raw WordPress feed works fine… so that would make it look like it was the fault of Feedburner Feedsmith.
• However, if I switch of caching with WordPress Supercache Plus, redirects work fine as well. I currently have a slightly old SVN bleeding edge version so something may have been tweaked since. It also affects WordPress Supercache as noted my Marc at WTC a month or so ago.
• This also started happening when I upgraded to WordPress 2.8.4, so that upgrade could be blamed

If I actually looked at my Feedburner stats more often than once a month, I might have noticed before, and have to thank Internet Business Solutions expert John for nudging me about it. (he has some great email marketing info)

The Bandaid Fix

This isn’t a permanent solution, one of the plugins or WordPress 2.8.4 is doing something wrong/different, but this works.

You just need to add /feed to the list of regular expression declarations which determine which pages are not cached, by whichever variation of caching plugin you are using.

This isn’t a major issue. Anything calling /feed for your primary RSS feed should be redirected to Feedburner anyway, and the same could be true of the primary comments feed.
The only heavier load would be for comment feeds for individual posts, and feeds for things like category & tag pages.

The culprit may indeed be the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin, as comments on Marks blog post suggest that alternative Feedburner redirect plugins work without any problems.

The problem is you have to be using the new blogger, and there seems to be some access restriction for existing Bloggers.

Previously Amit posted a way to get around the new blogger restrictions which I think he found among Ionut’s comments.

I have just tried that work around, and it didn’t work for me, so maybe Google have closed that loophole.

The thing I am interested in most is this note Amit made:-

Now the best part – even if you move from abc.blogspot.com to abc.com, your old links would still work and Google [via a simple DNS settting] will redirect the traffic to your new URLs. And the addresses of your blog posts saved on Digg, Del.icio.us would also work.

Having already moved my blog from blogspot to my own domain, I would appreciate a rock solid redirect with a 301.
Whilst I have previously mentioned Google seem to be following meta redirects, that might not be 100% reliable, and that doesn’t account for other search engines.

Yahoo and MSN seem to have kicked my old blogspot with the meta redirects out of the search index, but are not passing on old link equity in the way Google does.
For over a year before the redirect from blogspot I was holding top3 on all 3 major search engines.