Ghacks Feedburner Feed Stopped Updating: New Feed URL
I just got an email from long time reader Ben who told me that my feed would not update automatically anymore. After checking the feed it turned out that he was right. The Feedburner feed stopped working on February 10 and did not update anymore while the normal feed displays the latest articles just fine.
I went to Feedburner, tried pinging my feed, then re-synchronizing it, all to no avail. I then clicked on Feed Medic only to be told that my feed was just fine and not causing any errors.
Feedburner suggested to use the Feed Validator to check out that the feed was properly validating which it was.
One strange thing in the Feedburner control panel was that the statistics also stopped on February 10, 2010 which I suppose they should not have.
Feedburner does not have a support email address only a Google Group that one can post in. But the frequency that staff members seem to look at and reply to threads seems to be minimal at best.
Ghacks readers who have troubles with the feed can change the feed address to https://www.ghacks.net/feed/. This feed address is working fine and updating like usual.
Did anyone else experience issues with Feedburner feeds not updating or only periodically updating?
Update
The problem seems to be more complicated than that. I checked https://www.ghacks.net/feed/ in Firefox and it displayed just fine. I checked the same feed in Opera and it also showed entries up to February 10, 2010. Something is not right here. This means that it is likely that the issue is not Feedburner related but related to WordPress or the server.
Update 2
The issue has been fixed. It was related to the W3 Caching plugin which caches feeds by default as well. I disabled that in the settings and the feed should display fine now for all users.
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F ng nightmare with feedburner, and I used a google news search to create my feeds! You can create an RSS after searching a news topic by hitting the RSS logo. They even give instructions. I have 20 feeds and every day at least 1/2 completely do not work and the other half stopped updating the feed for some reason weeks ago. Nothing I do makes them work right. I regret ever getting involved with feedburner, and I know what I’m doing.
Today (14 februari 2010) around 1800 hour European central time i have the ghacks webste back in action. After 10 februari 2010 i could not get any more updates/new stories from the ghacks website with the firefox and MS explorer 8 brouwser(s)
So could this affect anyone with a WordPress blog who are using FeedBurner and the W3 Caching plugin (there must be thousands) or is there something unique here?
It can affect anyone and it is not related to feedburner per se.
People trust caching plugins too much. They can break stuff big time. I had some obscure issues myself at my blog in the past.
By the way header errors remain, you might want to look into that.
13,800 subscribers – wow, good going!!
C’mon, you just posted this article so you could show us that figure ;) !!
That’s just the Feedburner count. I do not use them exclusively so that my visitors can basically subscribe to any page on the site by adding /feed/ to it (comments, authors, categories, tags). The count should be higher.
That’s clever, I didn’t know that was possible.
I changed it because some users wanted to only read specific articles, e.g. all written by me or all Linux articles.
I just checked Ghack’s feed url here, it is already set to https://www.ghacks.net/feed/, but since when I don’t know :)
I am not sure this is the cause, but I hadn’t seen such errors before either. redbot.org check for headers of your feed gives:
“If-None-Match conditional requests are supported.
The 304 response is not allowed to have a body.
The 304 response’s Content-Length header is incorrect.
If-Modified-Since conditional requests are supported.
The 304 response is not allowed to have a body.
The 304 response’s Content-Length header is incorrect.”
304 is related to caching, so it might got FeedBurner confused.
Kick your fancy LiteSpeed setup. :)
Thanks Rarst, I though as well that it was caching related. The W3 plugin caches RSS feed entries as well. Not sure though why it was only displaying old contents in two browsers and not all clients.