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.
Related
I can't even believe I'm asking this but I've recently moved a client over from their old website platform, circa 2011 which had their blog on blogger - one of the features being a hit counter of pageviews or visits.
Everything is now on wordpress, and the client would still like to feature a similar style hit counter on the blog posts - there are plenty of plugins around for that however for his migrated blog posts he wants the hit counter to start at the previously recorded number. There's only about 24 blogs, so I can easily set each hit counter for those posts to start from there except, can I hell find a plugin.
This goes well beyond my knowledge, and wondered if anyone out there knew of a better approach?
Cheers,
Andy
I've got a site that has multiple share buttons on entries in a WordPress site.
We designed this so there are no individual entries to view, they're Podcasts and videos. The listing page has a minimum of 10 entries, each with share buttons.
Currently the share links and titles are working correctly. But the page is not recognizing the og:image, and instead is picking up the default logo for the site itself.
I read another post on Stack Overflow that said it might be an issue for LinkedIn if the image is utilizing SSL for the link. But I just find that hard to believe.
The other issue I'm struggling with, the docs say once an image is scraped it stays cached for approximately 7 days.
I had an issue with FaceBook and there's a debugger that allows you to rescrape the page which let's me verify my changes worked.
My two questions are, is there something other than the og:image i should be specifying? since I can't specify it per post, it's in the head of the page itself, i would think it would pick that up. No?
Second, is there a way a developer can re-check after the meta info has been changed to see if the changes worked, without having to wait the TTL on the cache?
try this:
url/link?blah=1
url/link?blah=2
url/link?blah=3
to get around the cache.
This should trick it into thinking its a new page each time.
Can i get a link to test?
Anthony Walz posted the correct answer. Through email he also helped another problem i had which corrected a new issue i didn't realize I had until i looked.
my LinkedIn shares were not picking up the show title, they were picking up the page description instead (i have several podcasts showing on one page, we don't use individual post pages, they all play from the listing.)
he pointed me to the developer docs on formatting sharing links
Which gives a real world example - here:
https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http://developer.linkedin.com&title=LinkedIn%20Developer%20Network
&summary=My%20favorite%20developer%20program&source=LinkedIn
Thanks a ton for assist Anthony!
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.
The FB Like count on one of our pages was reset to zero after we temporarily took the page offline (we recently reinstated the page onto it's old URL).
I understand from the FB Developer docs that Facebook scrapes our pages every 24 hours; I also understand that Like are linked to URLs.
Why has the page's Like count been reset to zero, even though it has been republished using the same URL? How long after a page is taken offline does FB consider it to be dead, and reset the Like count?
Thanks for your help,
Alex
I noticed that FB's debugger (http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug) was showing a Like count of 29 for our recently reinstated page - even though the page itself was still showing zero Likes. This gave me some hope that the missing Likes might be be added back onto the page.
Within minutes of playing with the debugger, the page's Like count was showing 29.
I'm still no closer to finding out the answer to my original question, but perhaps the FB debugger can help others with similar problems.
For all the RSS feeds I subscribe to I use Google Reader, which I love. I do however have a couple of specific RSS feeds that I'd like to be notified of as soon as they get updated (say, for example, an RSS feed for a forum I like to monitor and respond to as quickly as possible).
Are there any tools out there for this kind of monitoring which also have some kind of alert functionality (for example, a prompt window)?
I've tried Simbolic RSS Alert but I found it a bit buggy and couldn't get it to alert me as often as I liked.
Suggestions? Or perhaps a different experience with Simbolic?
If you have access to Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Thunderbird, these email clients allow you to add RSS feeds in the same way you would add an email account.
I use Google Reader generally but when I want to keep up-to-date with something specific, I add the RSS feed to Outlook and it arrives in my inbox as if it was an email.
RSS isn't "push", which means that you need to have something that polls the website. It's much less traffic than getting the whole site or front page (for instance, you can say "Give me all articles newer than the last time I asked"), but it's traffic nonetheless.
It's generally understood you shouldn't have a refresh of more than 30 minutes in an automated client. (Citation required).
Having said that, you may find a client which allows you to set a more frequent refresh.
RSS2mail is a simple python script which I used extensively a few years back.
As Matthew stated you really shouldn't bother an RSS feed more than the producer allows but you can use http headers to check for changes in a very light way which is something rss2email does quite well.
You could always knock something up yourself... I've done it in the past and it really isn't too difficult a job to write an RSS parser.
Of course, as others have mentioned, there's an etiquette question as to how much of the website's valuable bandwidth you want to hog for yourself in RSS request traffic. That's a matter for your own conscience. ;)
Reading all the answers reminded me that I actually never looked into solving this using a Firefox add-on. I soon found Update Scanner and I think it look really promising!
I like an old version of feedreader for that kind of use, where the icon in the system tray started spinning when new stuff came in (the new version goes from grey to yellow instead).
it's also possible to be alerted for each new message.
I've used Pingie to send me an SMS when a new item appears in an RSS feed. Perhaps, it will be useful for you, if you have a cellphone text messaging plan.
I use RSS Bandit (for Windows) to stay up to date with my RSS feeds/blogs.
There are lots of other RSS aggregator applications though.
If you don't want another "big" application but have Windows Vista, you can also choose to make Internet Explorer monitor the RSS feed and use the Feed sidebar application (called "Feedschlagzeilen in German version, not sure about the English one) that comes with Vista to show the latest headlines.
Since you mentioned a pop-up, I'll add Feed Notifier to the list. It sits in the Windows Tray (or whatever they call it now in Windows 7) and pops up a notification when there are new entries to your feeds. You can set it up with multiple feeds, each with its own polling interval. When there are new entries, it pops up a prompt which you can dismiss or click to go to the entry. You are able to go back and review recent entries later, even if you clicked to dismiss them the first time. If your PC is asleep when a new entry is added, you will be notified the next time you wake it up.