I am trying to add an RSS feed to my website embeetle.com. I am doing this "the hard way" by manually creating an XML file for the RSS feed. You can find it here: https://embeetle.com/rss.xml. The file has been validated using the W3 feed validator at https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=embeetle.com
The problem I have is that the RSS readers I tried are not displaying the most recent content of my RSS feed. I tried Feedly, Inoreader and NewsBlur. All of them are showing older versions of the feed, as if these are cached somewhere, and the cache is not updating (I waited 24 hours to make sure).
I guess I am doing something wrong here, but I have no clue what. I have been trying to find hints searching the web for hours. Any hints are welcome.
If you want to check: there should be two posts in the feed, one announcing our new RSS feed and one announcing the latest version of Embeetle. In the readers, I get only the second post, sometimes with out-of-date content.
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I am not a developer, and I have been doing my best to get a response from SoundCloud, but it's taking a very long time (despite being a "pro" member) and I need to make a decision.
I am one of the beta SoundCloud podcasters. SoundCloud recommends that we use Feedburner to generate the RSS we submit to iTunes. However, my FeedBurner RSS has an issue (involving graphics) and I can't figure out how to edit the feed without killing it and starting anew there and with Apple.
In trying to figure out how to deal with Feedburner, I found the myriad of complaints and rumors suggesting Feednurner will soon be on the outs. I then tried going with a third party service (RapidFeeds) -- importing the (valid) SoundCloud RSS wasn't working there though, and customer support has not responded in 4 days of waiting. SoundCloud tech support says they have been having trouble with many of these 3rd party vendors.
So ... I'm back to either Feedburner -- which, unless I can figure out how to edit the feed -- means I'll kill it, redo it, and resubmit to Apple ... and face the uncertainty of whether it'll be around (with my subscribers) in a few months ...
OR
I could use the naked SoundCloud RSS -- which will definitely work with Apple -- but I will not be able to TAG the feed in any way, nor will I have any idea of subscriber stats. SoundCloud SAYS they plan to add tagging/other RSS functionality "in the next couple of months" ... but will they?
I could use your opinions on what to do. I need to make a decision quickly as I'm holding up a website launch for this. Thanks.
You didn't describe the actual problem you're having, or give your source and FeedBurner feed URLs, so my advice will be a little blind.
Login to FeedBurner, click on your feed, and go to the "Optimize" tab. Your podcast settings are under "SmartCast." If you're having trouble with your podcast cover art, then the "Image" field is what you need to change.
If this isn't your exact issue, please let us know more details.
Despite the potential doom of FeedBurner (I predict its retirement will be announced in 2013), you are right to use FeedBurner if you're using SoundCloud to host your podcast.
SoundCloud is not a podcasting service and it seems that they don't give you full freedom over your RSS feed. This is the lifeblood of your podcast. So using FeedBurner gives you a lot more control than SoundCloud's feed, but you're still sacrificing the control you would have of running your own website.
I developed an RSS feed following a tutorial and I think the .xml file itself is in order. However, I have two problems:
When people click on the RSS link, it doesn't automatically load into their RSS readers
For those that don't have an RSS reader, clicking the link results in a page full of code which is not very understandable
I was hoping that there might be some tips on how to easily realize this.
Try to remove the <![CDATA[ and ]]> in the description tag.
I downloaded your xml, changed those lines, tested it on my server, and it worked in google's rss reader.
This is a browser and user profile dependent issue in how the RSS link is going to react when clicked on.
If the user has the action set up to automatically load it into their feed reader of choice, it will do that.
If they don't, then it won't.
For those that just see a raw dump, it could be that they're using a browser that does not support RSS feeds and will dump out the XML as raw text. Google Chrome (at least still in version 18) without the use of extensions or add-ons will usually be the dump truck culprit here.
There is a blog, powered by Wordpress, which has valid RSS feed (opens up fine in Safari), but doesn't show new posts in Google Reader. In fact, the latest article from Google Reader is from Jul 21, 2010, while the latest article on the blog dates to Aug 19, 2010.
What should I do about the RSS feed (escape characters? modify XML or what?) for it to work on Google Reader?
This is a reopened question, because the original question I found was migrated to superuser, then closed there because it is best fitted on stackoverflow, so no solution was ever provided, and no chance was given to do so. Please give it a chance to get answered.
Update:
Google Reader pulls new articles, in groups of 10, and not the latest. For example if 12 (or 13, or 11) new articles are not shown in Google Reader, when the next one is added, the oldest 10 (exactly 10) of these articles appear on Google Reader, and the date shown in Google Reader is equal for each article, as if all 10 were published in the same second - the second they appeared on Google Reader. This problem doesn't manifest itself in other aggregators that I've tried.
Update 2:
Articles started showing up regularly, so the problem is solved, temporarily. Why did it happen I don't know, maybe it's because more readers subscribed (for testing purposes), or it's because of the PubSubHubBub plugin that I've added recently. Until it becomes clear, and for 3 more days, this question remains open.
I just added the blog to my Google Reader and had a bit of a play. I noticed the same behaviour you observed where I was missing the 5 most recent posts and a bunch of about 10 of them all had the same date:
After doing a bit of a search on the web, I found this post which explains how you can actually view the Published date via a tooltip on the right-hand side:
Then once I click the "Refresh" button from Google Reader at the top, the new posts showed up:
I believe that high volume blogs that are on the Google spiders' radar would be indexed every few hours and therefore all posts would have their Received date very close to the Published date so nobody notices/cares that it is actually displaying the Recevied date.
For low volume blogs however, it seems the cache is updated much less frequently. Google has some tips to try to get it to update - Feed not updating in Reader. Maybe my subscription to the blog updated the cache, but as the spider has a delay I didn't see the updates till pressing "Refresh". Or maybe the act of pressing the "Refresh" button triggered it to look for new posts immediately.
Lastly I subscribed the blog to my wife's Google Reader account and this time the 5 latest posts came up straight away with matching Received times which translated back to about the time when I pressed the "Refresh" button (or maybe it was when I added the feed).
I feel your pain - I agree that it all seems a bit cumbersome for a low volume RSS feed ...
You may also check with the blog author / hosting company and see if they have turned down the Google indexing rate. Google can create high volumes of traffic on a site. Turning down the indexing rate (crawl rate) will help with that but it b0rks Google Reader.
As other posters have mentioned, it could also be a factor of low popularity / low page rank / something else causing Googlebot to fail to crawl the blog frequently enough.
Google Reader display is dependent on Google crawling the blog to pick up the latest content. Realistically, you'll want a client side pull of the RSS feed to get the latest data so you aren't dependent on Google crawling the website. Outlook 2010, Firefox, many others exist. The client side software will directly pull the updated RSS feed from the blog, capturing the posts as they are published to the RSS feed.
Thank you for your responses, I too have come up with some possible solutions (thanks to you).
I don't know whether It's something I did, or independent of that, but as from yesterday (when you answered to this question), feeds started showing up normally.
Maybe it is due to the fact that thanks to you the blog got more subscribers on Google Reader and the Update Rate bounced (just like #Bermo suggested).
Or, maybe the introduction of the PubSubHubBub plugin changed something. But it's rather the first variant (number of subscribers). Though it is still a mystery why other extremely unpopular blogs give me regular articles in Google Reader.
For now I will only upvote good answers, until everything becomes clear (can't really determine the exact cause) or until the last day of this bounty.
I have a naive question about RSS feeds.
I have a series of timed events which appear on my site and that I make available as an RSS feed for other applications to import.
Who is typically responsible for truncating this feed? Over the next year, I can see my feed having thousands of items. Should the URL mysite.com/rss always return all items? And leave it to the readers to just show the most recent? Or is it more customary that I only return, say, the top 50? Expecting the readers to cache older items? (And, if so, is there a convention for readers to ask the server for the "next page")?
What is the typical behaviour of something like FriendFeed when it pulls in an RSS stream?
You should return only top few. Readers are supposed to save older items. Readers also usually ask for the feed many times a day, so you'll want to keep its size low to save bandwidth. If someone wants to browse your archives they'll typically do its via our web site. RSS is mostly for syndication of new items.
On a Wordpress site, I have both a normal blog that I want Google to detect and an RSS feed for outgoing links to other sites. I don't need/want bots to get at this other RSS feed nor do I want people to be able to get the link for their own use.
I've disabled RSS for the main blog successfully but am not sure how to encrypt/protect/hide the RSS link for this additional feed.
I'm not sure how Facebook runs a newsfeed without RSS but however they do it is probably beyond my means/experience to replicate.
Where these are just outgoing links, I don't think copyright notices in the feed will do much. Maybe there is a way to output the links automatically through a means other than RSS?
Use Robots.Text www.robotstxt.org to prevent google from following the link. All self respecting robots should follow the directives in the robots.txt file. This file needs to go in the root of your sit.
The basic answer to this is to use a method of getting the feed entries in a manner other than using the actual RSS like outputting JSON, going through the API, etc.
It will help prevent scraping though not completely.