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Your blog’s Feedburner RSS feed won’t update. Do you know what to do? Josh Kohlbach does. Here’s what Josh has to say about the matter.
Feedburner icon
Here’s a WordPress Gotcha! that I stumbled across recently:
No matter how many times I pinged Feedburner, they wouldn’t update my feed with my latest articles.
After trying to ping my feed many times over with no success I took it a step further and tried to Resync my feed (generally something you do as a last resort according to FeedBurner) and it was then that I discovered what the real problem was.
My feed’s file size was too big!
I knew immediately that it would be some WordPress setting that I mistakenly set early on which was pushing my feed size up. But I really wanted to find out just how big it was.
How To Find Out Your Feed’s Size
A great way to find out how big your RSS feed has grown to is to check with Web-Sniffer’s handy little tool.
This basically allows you to check certain meta data about any website page you input, including RSS feeds – perfect!
To check this you’ll actually need the address that points to your original feed. For me (and most WordPress users) it was just a matter of adding /feed to the end of my site’s URL.
My feed size was just over 512kb which is quite a lot considering all that actually counts toward your feed’s file size is the text that features in your posts.
The Cause
After a little more searching around on the web I discovered that the average feed only stores between 10 and 25 full sized posts – even on the busiest blogs.
I checked my settings in WordPress under Settings->Reading and low and behold, I was storing over 150 backlogged posts in my RSS feed. Way too much – which explains the enormous size of my original RSS feed.
The Fix
I tapered this Syndication feeds setting back to 25 previous posts and pinged my feed using Feedburner’s ping tool. After that it updated all the posts that were “stuck” in the pipeline.
You gotta Gotcha? Wanna post it here on Website In A Weekend? Send it on along.
Josh Kohlbach is a professional freelance programmer and web designer
based in Brisbane, Australia. Josh's blog
Code My Own Road is
packed with small business tips and technical tutorials for
Do-It-Yourself entrepreneurs.
Nice tip Josh! I just went into WordPress and checked my settings to avoid this problem myself.
I have my settings at 10 posts in my RSS feed. Is there any reason to have it set higher, like at 25 as you mention?
.-= Sean´s last blog ..Speed Bumps on the Road to Productivity =-.
Great tips. Luckily my Feedburner is working perfectly!
.-= Gabe | freebloghelp.com´s last blog ..Is keyword density something to consider for SEO? =-.
@Sean – Thanks! – I think 10 should be ample for most smaller blogs. I’ll probably taper mine again if I have further problems.
@Gabe – Thanks Gabe – mine was working perfectly as well even at the 150 posts setting for the longest time, but now I prefer to write longer articles it’s no surprise the size started to jump a bit causing the issue.
.-= Josh Kohlbach´s last blog ..Your Free Guide On How To Make A Free Guide! =-.
My feed burner is working all right. And I can keep track of its whereabouts everytime I post by subscribing to my own blog.
But what pisses me off is that the feeds comes in late, more than a day or two to arrive on my email and reader.
.-= elmot´s last blog ..Stop Tweeting Political Stuffs, Bro. Seriously. =-.
Oooo niche find! I’ll be sharing this with my network, thanks!
.-= Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach ´s last blog ..Internet Marketing for Your Mom (what YOU need to know!) =-.
Fantastic. This one goes into my never ending “Read in case of emergency” file, lol. Just did a “sniff” right now, and everything seems to be working properly. Nice find. Thanks Josh, and Dave for letting in good writers in you blog
@DiTesco –
Yeah, these kinds of things NEVER happen to developers, because the developers just “know” not to do such things. I know this from experience as a developer!
I’m sure there’s hundreds of these Gotchas! floating around out there. I’d to collect a bunch of them.
If you know of any, I’d love to have you as a guest author.
(I’ll be pitching you at some point… after I get the site design upgraded.)
.-= Dr WordPress!´s last blog ..Payload-Envelope-Transport (PET) model for peer-to-peer overlay networks =-.