CommentLuv is a great WordPress plugin that allows commenters to be rewarded for their comments with a link back to their blog. I discovered some sites that were using this and so I wanted to get in on the action too. Unfortunately, my initial attempt was thwarted by “A feed could not be found” error.

I immediately went to my site’s feed link and checked it out. I noticed that there was a cache date by WP Super Cache so I made some tweaks at first to avail. Then I tried deleting the cache… also to no avail. I finally threw my hands up in the air and just disabled the plugin altogether. Guess what? That didn’t get my feed to update either.

At this point, I figured I’d done about all I was able to do on my own without consulting my favorite IT guy Mr. Google. After a quick search I turned up this little post on Andy Bailey’s CommentLuv website titled Help Desk.

It turns out it’s a fairly common error to get, along with “Empty feed” or “Curl error.” The solution is pretty simple actually. The very first thing to check is if your WordPress theme is properly displaying the RSS feed link. This little link tag in the HTML head section tells CommentLuv what URL it needs to read to access your feed. My theme didn’t have this line inserted. Simply “View Source” on any page on your site and do a search for “rss.” If nothing turns up similar to:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Blog RSS Feed" href="http://myblog.com/feed/" />

then you’ll need to make an adjustment to your theme. There are two easy ways for this. If you are running WordPress 3.0+, then you can simply go to your theme’s function.php file and stick this line at the bottom (to be safe if you can’t read code):

add_theme_support( 'automatic-feed-links' );

Otherwise the task is only slightly more complicated. Load your header.php file and add this line somewhere between the tags in the HTML:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

That solved the problem for me despite never figuring out why my feed was still cached by WP Super Cache even though I had it disabled. My CommentLuv comment went through and loaded up my most recent posts to select so I could get a free link. If you are getting the “A feed could not be found” error the solution may simply be a matter of modifying your theme so that it points to the RSS feed, a good practice in general. Most themes I’ve seen should have this already in there somewhere so this should be an uncommon problem. If you’ve got your own custom theme or have a heavily modified one, then this may solve the CommentLuv feed error issue.