FeedBurner has, for the moment, been classified as “that which I am powerless to change” in the Serenity Prayer system of nomenclature. I thought I’d set everything up correctly (I created a brand-new account on FeedBurner.com, then downloaded, installed, activated, and configured the FeedBurner plugin for WordPress…but nope, nothin’.

On the plus side, FeedBurner is gamely maintaining a remarkably-accurate simulation of a working thing. There’s a feed there and it works. But every time I try to subscribe to my own feed, I get the WordPress feed and not FeedBurner’s.

All of the official and user-generated documentation on this thing says that the plugin contains 100% of the necessary mojo. No need for me to edit the site’s .htcaccess file or to chalk anything onto the carpet that my former parish priest wouldn’t approve of. And yet…it ain’t working.

In a way, the most frustrating diagnostic problems are the ones dealing with tools that are just plain supposed to work without any addition configuration. If this plugin were more complicated, then fixing it would probably be a piece of cake. As it is, you wind up double-checking that the plugin is active and that you typed in the name of your feed correctly.

And then it’s all down to blinking and sighing until Bongo, The God Of Such Things decides that you’ve blinked and sighed enough and he grants you your boon.

Okay, well, I’ve turned FeedBurner off for now. To be honest, I had two concerns about it. Even if it worked like a charm, I still had to figure out how to best configure separate feeds for all the various kinds of content I’ll be slinging here. WordPress’ build-in RSS generator doesn’t have all the oomph of FeedBurner, but at least it works transparently.

Rrgh. For a test blog, I don’t seem to be doing a lot of testing, eh?

My apologies. This is the final week of production on my iPhone book and I’m using up every last second I have to make it The Best God-Damned Book Ever Written. “Moby Dick”? “Great Expectations”? “The King James Bible (Special Edition With All Of The Naughty Stuff Outlined In Purple)”? Forget ‘em. Toss them into the recycling because “iPhone: Fully Loaded” will without any question become the standard by which all great literature is compared.

All great literature will fail by comparison, but it’s good that these other writers keep themselves busy and have some sort of goal. Don’t you think?

So there are two immediate priorities going on with the Celestial House of Binary (BETA):

1) Create a somewhat awesome new Wordpress theme. Workin’ on it. I’ve found a couple of neat tutorials and starting points (thanks in part to a public call for same on MacBreakWeekly) that have given me a big leap on this. I’ll post links later.

I’ve also worked out the color scheme, based on a page of comic book art. I photographed the page, handed it off to Flickr Toys’ Palette Generator, and bango: I immediately had a CSS stylesheet with those colors all locked and loaded.

2) Figure out the best way to wire up the RSS feed. My homebrew blogging app has a long list of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that although it observes most of the ginchier web standards (like RSS) it’s still bloody invisible to the search engines and trackers and other mechanisms that folks use to find stuff on the Web. It’s off on its own island somehow and I’ve no idea why.

Case in point: I did my usual egosurf on Technorati and as usual, Yellowtext posts on the Colossal Waste of Bandwidth are nowhere to be seen. But posts here on the Celestial House of Binary pop up immediately.

This is discouraging for Yellowtext. Dammit, it’s been online and RSS-ified for something like five years now, and it’s been linked all over the place. Whereas Ihnatko.com has only been live for a few weeks, with no word-of-mouth at all.

So before I tell people to come on down to Ihnatko.com (for all your badland RV sales and service needs), I wanna make sure that the RSS system is as studly as it can to be.

Mmmmm…okey-doke. Then Feedburner, I guess? I’ve looked at this service as a technology pundit and I’ve looked at it as an author with a longstanding blog and now I’ve looked at it as someone starting up a new blog, and each time the site tells me the exact same thing:

“Feedburner has something to do with hosting RSS feeds. The thing that it does, whatever it is, will work out for you in the long run. Honest.”

Feedburner desperately needs an “elevator pitch.” That is, if you have an idea for a movie and you want to get George Lucas excited about it and you’ve got an hour of his time, well, awesome. But in reality,

(Yes. The reality of getting a chance to pitch a movie idea to George Lucas. I regretted that as soon as I typed it. If only there were some way of un-writing that before you all read it. I can only apologize and move on.)

…But in reality, the best you can count on is having ten or twenty seconds between the time you realize that the man standing next to you in the elevator is the guy who did “American Graffiti” and “THX-1138″ and “Star Wars” and even “Radioland Murders”, and the time one of his goons pulls your sweatshirt over your face NHL-style and shoves you into a fountain in the lobby.

You can’t sell nothin’ without an elevator pitch: ten to twenty seconds that will engage enough of someone’s interest that they’ll want to hear the “real” pitch. FeedBurner’s site lacks those critical ten to twenty seconds.

Well, I’ll figure it out. Next week. When the book is done and the birds are singing in the trees and the bacon is once again hot, crisp and flavorful. Until then, I am stuck in my office, singing showstopping numbers from the classic musical “Showboat” and feeling like the most miserable bastard alive.