SEO process blogs for beginners / newbies

This is a log of what happened:

20 Sept 07
SEO mommy wordpress blog feed URL was showing error for past few weeks:

1. the blog summaries were not showing up in the feed
2. i kept getting an error message
3. i checked with the W3c validator and it found 6 errors on that page
4. (a few weeks ago, I guess to try to see if i could fix the problem, i  made a copy of the blog/wp-includes/feed-rss.php file on the server by making a copy, and renaming it blog/wp-includes/feed-rss-original.php.)
5.  Today i changed the file from (feed-rss-original.php) to its original name (feed-rss.php)
6. now the URL works, but my past entries still don’t show up under www.seomommy.com/blog/feed
7. I have to fix this problem
8. I added a test post to see whether it and my previous posts would show up since recently it looked like my last few posts were not being recognized. (I did something with the wordpress system recently and honestly i can’t remember the whole story…..)
9. Anyway, I created and saved a ‘test’ post and the test post showed up with the previous posts. I guess it just took a few minutes to work
10. The first few posts don’t show up and there’s no ‘previous posts’ link to them.
11. I deleted the test post and refreshed the feed page and the posts show up. (Again, the first few posts don’t show up and there’s no ‘previous posts’ link to them.)
12. I checked the feed URL in the W3C validator again and this time “This Page Is well-formed XML!”

Conclusion:

• I think that because I had messed with the names of the original file (although I just renamed the original files and made copies of them) that everything got messed up. Maybe the system was programmed to deal only with the originals.
• This is my conclusion because as soon as i changed the original file names back to their original names, the problem was fixed.

Note: I did a similar file name change to feed-rss2-comments.php and it showed an error as well. Then i renamed that particular file as it was before and now the comments from blogs posted are showing.

Can you believe. This problem started weeks ago and I thought I had to get the help of a technical guy to help me figure this one out. I don’t even know how/why I ended up thinking of giving the files their original names back. I don’t understand all the technicalities, but hey I did it, and it WORKED! The feeling of accomplishing someone on your own. WOW!