Adding featured images aka thumbnails to my WordPress theme turned out to be a lot of work. Getting them to appear in my RSS feed in a valid manner was probably the worst, but what is going to take the longest time is retroactively adding featured images to all my old posts…

Back in the day, ie the 90s when you redid your homepage it was a big deal. Now everyone and their dog is online and people don’t even need to know HTML to have a “home page”. I’ve been maintaining a homepage online since 1995…

In fact it can’t have any images at all. I’m still not satisfied with how thumbnails are being added to my RSS 2.0 feed, in my opinion it isn’t perfect because SimplePie can’t find them when it looks in enclosure->thumbnails…

I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted thumbnails with a proper enclosure in my RSS 2.0 feeds. Other blogs have this, why doesn’t mine? I enabled featured images in my theme, I got them to appear on my blog’s homepage, in the archives, even in the posts themselves if I wanted. I followed tutorials, I installed plugins, I consulted support forums. Still no thumbnails in my RSS feeds…

Although I’ve maintained a WordPress blog since 2005, I’ve only ever had the one theme. I made the theme myself back in the summer of 2005. I think a tutorial from Urban Giraffe may have provided the basis for my theme. I made sure my theme and entire blog fit within the already establish look, feel, and navigation of Muschamp.ca and I’ve dutifully updated the theme, every time a WordPress upgrade has forced me. I’ve also added many minor changes, but a look in the Wayback machine shows how little has changed until just the last few days…