I’ve been noticing some weird feed related issues for some time now, and after looking into the problem this morning I still can’t say what the problem is. Or, more importantly, where it is. Is it Feedburner? Or WordPress? A WordPress plugin? Apache? No idea.
There are a variety of symptoms to my feed issues, which may or may not be related.
- Feed not resolving:
As noted before by Coop, periodically someone visiting http://feeds.feedburner.com/tecosystems – this blog’s official feed – will find an empty feed. Nothing will resolve at that address. I’ve only seen this behavior once or twice, but it’s weird. Scans of the Feedburner forums indicate that it’s usually due to a problem with the feed itself. - Problems w/ the Feed:
As pictured in the inline image, it’s clear that Feedburner is having some sort of problem with my WordPress feed. What’s significantly less clear is who’s fault that is. According to Feedburner, several times an hour the WordPress feed becomes unreachable. Every time I visit the WP feed, however, everything seems fine. Never had a problem. - Feed Not Updating:
Probably due, in part, to a combination of the above, my feed is periodically refusing to update. The problem with my frontpage Feedburner chicklet seems to have resolved itself (no idea how), but occasionally the feed isn’t updating in Google Reader, and just yesterday my Dad informed that it hadn’t updated on My Yahoo for several days. This defines suboptimal.
At this point, I’m more or less out of ideas. I’ve tried deactivating both my Atom 1.0 and Bad behavior plugins in WordPress in the event that they were at the root of Feedburner’s issues with my feed, but thus far they’ve done nothing to remedy the situation. Suggestions are, as always, appreciated, and otherwise I’ll probably try and revisit the situation next week when I have more time. Also, if you observe strange feed behaviors please do let me know. I almost certainly can’t fix them, but it’s more evidence for debugging.
Joe Kottke says:
December 19, 2006 at 7:07 am
Hi there. We’ve been seeing this issue lately with a handful of feeds, and it is a really difficult one to catch in process. It is usually a problem with the source feed (as you mentioned) but we’ll need to poll the feed in our lab for a while to confirm this.
Please shoot me an email directly for further correspondence on the issue.
We’ll get it sorted out.
Regards,
Joe Kottke
Director of Network Operations
FeedBurner
tecosystems » Some Good, Some Bad says:
January 15, 2007 at 7:10 pm
[…] First mentioned back in December, this issue was simple: Feedburner and WordPress couldn’t seem to play nicely together. After cutting over to WordPress, Feedburner continued to report issues every time it picked up the feed. Fortunately, Alex pointed me to a fix here. Having made the code changes recommended in that entry (which won’t be necessary >= 2.0.7), I’m happy to report that the issue appears to be resolved. That’s good. […]