Jetpack WordPress.com Reader – No Bell notification on Published articles +

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    I have tried opening other threads about the issue and it is still persisting. I made sure I read through ALL of the guides and information offered and prior to that spent a chunk of time Googling for the issue. I have closed out all my other topics and this is the freshest one.

    I have gathered 100+ subscribers.

    I just published an article 25 minutes ago and it still hasn’t shown up in the Reader and it doesn’t come up in a search. The article was also not acknowledged by the little bell icon. Sigh. Those are the two items I wish would work again. I know however the articles are making it to my subscribers via their email or however they have their notifications set because I get the likes and comments.

    I wish specifically for those two items to work. It is NOT a post type issue or any of the other common answers given by default to these sorts of questions. I have opened 4+ topics on this (they are closed out) and I just wish those two items would work. Showing up in Recent in Reader, and having the publishing of a post acknowledged by the bell icon.

    https://zettabytes.org/2025/08/15/nasa-news-2025-08-15/ is the latest article I have published.

    Just finished reading the Reader documentation.

    Thanks.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    2020testjj · Member ·

    Hi there, have you checked to see if your feed is updating correctly?

    This is what I see when I try to add your site’s feed to my WordPress.com Reader (and it doesn’t matter if I remove /feed/ )

    And this is what it looks like to me in the Reader itself. There’s no post from August 15, 2025 appearing first

    I’d really suggest posting to the Jetpack forum about this. I did find a similar, previous topic here.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    This seems to be exactly the issue with published not getting out to most of my subscribers, the bell icon not acknowledging new posts, and most importantly my published articles not making it the Recent section of the WordPress.Com Reader. Let me know if you have BuyMeACoffee or something similar.

    I believe you have discovered the root cause of all my current issues and I am currently in contact with my theme support, and have a ton of documentation now to read through concerning the RSS feed, a piece I know nothing about and treated as a black box and assumed was working as I’ve never seen any errors anywhere concerning it.

    I will visit the Jetpack section you mentioned and consume that information as well review the topic you linked with someone having a similar issue, finally.

    I will give complete updates as things change.

    Thank you.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    Jetpack Boost seemed to be a major source of most of WordPress woes I’ve discovered. Removing it has fixed many things. As mentioned above I knew almost nothing about RSS but after doing some research and making some changes to my https://zettabytes.org site, that being removing Jetpack Boost, many problems that I have been encountering have gone away.

    I’m pretty sure this is in no way the fault of Jetpack Boost but probably more in the way I had things setup and how I had Boost configured, that primarily being running in it’s pretty much unaltered state and having all the options enabled.

    Either way, I downloaded the RSS reader “Fluent” and as soon as I added my site, it now shows my most recent 5 articles (I have it configured that vie WordPress Settings->Reading.

    Would someone else, hopefully including 2020testjj check my RSS feed and confirm the latest article referenced above now shows, instead of the “Bezel” article?

    I worked on all aspects of this till 3 in morning and with my first RSS reader pointed at my site confirmed I am seeing the last 5 most recent articles, which neither show on the WordPress Reader site or if searched for. I think my woes have finally addressed. I can’t wait till I publish the next article and if it shows up in the Recent section of the Reader AND I get the acknowledgement by the Reader “bell” I will finally be able to put this issue to rest, and tackle real world problems. ;)

    Thanks.

    PS. So you don’t have to scroll up this is my most recent published article:

    https://zettabytes.org/2025/08/15/nasa-news-2025-08-15/

    Once I have confirmed everything is indeed finally working, I will leave a final update, describe my issues and their resolution so that the next person might not have to expend the effort I did to finally get everything working.

  • Unknown's avatar
    2020testjj · Member ·

    Glad to hear that your RSS feed app shows the latest posts correctly, but, dang!

    I just checked my Reader subscription to your site here in a web browser and I’m afraid there’s no change to the post order. Perhaps this is a caching issue on WordPress.com’s side.

    I’ll go ahead and tag your thread for staff.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    Dang. This has been incredibly difficult to deal with. I’ve already resigned myself that it’s probably just not going to work for whatever reason. Truly frustrating, but will be something easy to ignore to forget about eventually. In the scheme of all thing it’s really not that important, at one point it was but I give up now.

  • Unknown's avatar
    2020testjj · Member ·

    Well, the good news is that in other feed readers, like Feedly, your posts appear in reverse chronological order as they should, just not in the WordPress.com Reader.

    One thing that may help debug this is that when I subscribed to your site and received the initial Jetpack welcome email, it said I successfully subscribed to azure.zettabytes.org

    Hope that helps. Let’s now wait for staff to look in here.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    Oh! That might help. That was the old name when the server was on the Microsoft Azure cloud. I moved my servers to VPS’s on IONOS for financial reasons and phased it out over a couple of years and completely removed it from my DNS server just a few weeks ago.

    I thought I had scrubbed all the traces of that subdomain but hadn’t considered another entity might be holding onto it.

    I guess I can lift the feeling of defeat for a little while I consider this. Maybe that’s the server name I originally opened the WordPress.Com/Reader/Jetpack account with way back when. That was it’s own little nightmare which I had thought I finally removed all traces of but apparently it’s out there in places where I have control. I don’t see that name anywhere in any of my WordPress.com accounts.

    That means that’s the name WordPress.com thinks is the name of my server. I’m not going to re-add a A or Canonical DNS record to revive that as it took me literally years to finally get everything away from that subdomain name. Classic lingering DNS issue.

    Is it possible WordPress.Com is using that address as the WordPress server on my account? More importantly is there any avenue that’s available to get them to change/alias or remove that old subdomain name or simply change it to plain old “zettabytes.org” as the server of account?

    Right now that server is on a now legacy Ubuntu 20.04 server and it will be migrated to an Ubuntu 24.04 server probably by the end of the month. I was hoping that might solve my issues with a new fresh installation on a currently supported server but it will mean nothing if WordPress.com thinks that’s the name of my server on my Reader account.

    Well, you’ve come the closest in helping me through this issue and have discovered details I literally would not have been able to.

    Let me know about my thoughts on possibly having WordPress.com checking to see if azure.zettabytes.org is in fact connected to my account and if that can be changed.

    Thank you again.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    I meant “where I have NO control” up there in the third paragraph.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    Just for kicks I did add the canonical record for azure to my DNS and that doesn’t affect anything at all (azure.zettabytes.org). I will be removing it immediately.

    I just published an article and of no bell notification and it did not show up on the Recent section of the Reader.

    The newest article is:

    4NOMALY YouTube Channel – Analog and other Horror
  • bobmatyas · Staff ·

    Hi @rljpdx –

    It looks like your site has an issue where http isn’t always redirecting to https as would be expected. So on our end, our system is looking for http://zettabytes.org/feed/ which is resulting in a 404.

    Redirecting http to https should fix the issue and cause items to load properly in Reader.

    We tested with this command:

    $ curl -I http://zettabytes.org/feed/
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 13:19:58 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    zettabytes.org was migrated to an Ubuntu 24 server 3 days ago. and the previously known flaky webdir to webdir redirect on same server no longer exists. It sits in it’s own vhost space now.

    I just added rewrite entries to zettabytes vhost 80 configuration to redirect to 443 properly now.

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

    I published an article today and no Bell acknowledgement still and article never showed up in the Recent section of the Reader. Here’s a link to todays published article:

    https://zettabytes.org/one-of-the-more-satisfying-linux-unix-commands-what-separates-the-big-boys-from-the-little-ones/

    Still no bell acknowledgement, still no article in Recent. Still “Belling” or “Recenting”.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    Rewrites now working to redirect to 443 properly but still no Bell notification of just now published article. I didn’t bother to check if it made it to the Reader site because if the Bell don’t know, Reader don’t either.

    So we can strike flaky redirect issue which no longer exists as not being the culprit behind my Bell or Recent woes.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    BTW:

    root@staging:/backups/modellers# curl -I http://www.zettabytes.org/feed
    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 21:20:20 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)
    Location: https://www.zettabytes.org/feed
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

    So that’s proper now.

    If I moved a published article from to draft and then back to published will that possibly activate the bella and send the article off to Recent in reader. If not, I’ll think of something to publish in the next few hours or so and see what happens.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    I’m pretty sure everything is setup correctly on my end. I migrated an entire web site mostly because it needed to be migrated, but with the secondary goal that maybe it would fix this Bell/Recent issue.

    Alas no, I have done everything the engineers have asked me to do still with no traction.

    Well, my websites up on a modern server at least and still works, so thanks goodness for that.

  • bobmatyas · Staff ·

    Hi @rljpdx –

    I tried to look into this, but at present, your site isn’t loading for myself or a colleague. For example, I’m now seeing:

    curl -I https://www.zettabytes.org/feed
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: www.zettabytes.org

    Could you check to see if your server is down or if there is a configuration issue that is preventing access?

    Once we hear back from you, we’ll go from there.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    Migration blues. IONOS has a funky way of dealing with DNS. Though it looks intuitive enough in the admin panel, once you attempt to do anything, frustration soon arises.

    I just got the DNS records for the domain zettabytes.org taken care of and the site is back up.

    From off the server:

    isnot_server:~/# curl -I https://zettabytes.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2025 14:32:14 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)
Set-Cookie: asp_transient_id=99434798382b0427a751ea027b8a3258; expires=Fri, 29 Aug 2025 14:32:14 GMT; Max-Age=604800; path=/
Vary: accept,content-type
Link: <https://zettabytes.org/wp-json/>; rel="https://api.w.org/"
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

    On the server itself:

    is_server:~/# curl -I https://zettabytes.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2025 14:32:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)
Set-Cookie: asp_transient_id=ee7ed3440c67536d18d8529f9e724a61; expires=Fri, 29 Aug 2025 14:32:00 GMT; Max-Age=604800; path=/
Vary: accept,content-type
Link: <https://zettabytes.org/wp-json/>; rel="https://api.w.org/"
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
  • bobmatyas · Staff ·

    Hi @rljpdx –

    Thanks for your continued work here.

    I was looking at this and http was redirecting to https and I was about to escalate the issue to our development team, but I now see that the redirect is once again failing:

    curl -I http://zettabytes.org/feed/
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2025 15:20:44 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

    It is also failing in the browser:

    Could you take another look and confirm that the redirect is working as expected?

    I tested from a few different providers/locations and had the same issue.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    I dug a little deeper into the certificates, the server, the virtual host file and found some weirdness. http://www.zettabytes.org and zettabytes.org each had their own separate certificates and the rewrite rules were stacked 3 deep and were differing. That part was probably my fault.

    DNS checks out. www is a canonical and A record for zettabytes and rest of zone file look clean now.

    It’s all cleaned up now, zettabytes.org and http://www.zettabytes.org are properly on the same cert, virtual hosts file has been cleaned up, apache2.conf double checked to see if there was any directory weirdness from previous changes.

    You should be getting proper responses from the site as well as redirect. Fingers crossed.

  • Unknown's avatar
    rljpdx · Member ·

    Oh look at that, just checked the Reader and FINALLY all posts are showing up including latest. Now for final testing I need to write another article (probably won’t happen today) but this is the first time in months Reader reflects the published articles on the site properly.

    I think we just might finally be there. These external issues could also be the reason for me turning a cold shoulder on a few of the Jetpack products. Once this is all squared away I’ll start testing the Jetpack plugins I removed and see if things look good on that front as well.

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