RSS Feed Issues

February 21, 2007 @ 9:19 pm- from Maui, Hawaii

Hmmm… several people have complained that my RSS feed seems to be doubling up. Up until today I’ve not seen this happen, but today in Outlook I too see that the RSS feed is doubling up recent entries. Frankly I’m not sure what’s doing this since the entries are created with guid entry that points at the message ids – these ids don’t change so there’s no reason for anything to double up.

What are feed readers actually keying off to determine whether a post is new and unique? As far as I know nothing is changing in either the link or guid keys or the pubDate which should between them identify a post as unique. Unfortunately I can't see a way to compare the raw XML of the entries in readers to potentially see what the difference is <s>.

My feed is actually served by FeedBurner and I’m wondering if FeedBurner is potentially hosing the feed somehow, but looking at the generated RSS it looks like it’s using my original RSS code and then adding a few additional tags into the RSS.

Oddly enough I have another BLOG I’m running that is completely separate and it too just doubled up in Outlook, which is really strange since both of them have been just fine for over a month. Neither of these blogs have had new entries for a week or so since I’ve been gone out of office.

There have been another set of oddities over the last week or so as well. I noticed that sometime last week my subscribership jumped from about 1600 people to over 2500 even though there were no changes which is odd. Especially since last week was probably one of the slowest on the blog ever since I stopped writing as I was out of town snowboarding. I guess it pays to shut up every once in a while <s>.

Anyway – I’m wondering if the problems are caused possibly by something happening at Feedburner. So I subscribed to a few other blogs in Outlook that use Feedburner to see if there’s similar behavior.

In the meantime if you are having serious issues with the feed, could you try using the direct access URL:

http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/rss.aspx?force=true

This link doesn’t redirect to Feedburner.

Incidentally it’s only Outlook I see issues with. The IE 7 Feedreader is fine as is my somewhat dated version of FeedDemon I use occasionally. However, others have reported issues with Google reader as well.

If anybody has any other ideas or anything similar happen with Feedburner I’d love to hear about it.

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re: RSS Feed Issues
by Eric Appel February 21, 2007 @ 10:44 pm

Rick - the subscriber jump is probably due to the fact that Google Reader started reporting subscriber numbers last week. So now instead of all Google subscribers being reported together as a single subscriber, Google actually puts the current number of subscribers in the header of the request for the feed.

Also, I use Google Reader to subscribe to your feed and about once a week I get your last 10-20 posts marked as new in my reader.

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Martin February 22, 2007 @ 12:21 am

Hi Rick, I'm using RssBandit and I also see your posts appear twice or even three times.
Don't know when exactly this happens - the newest posts arrive only once, but some times when I refresh the feed, older posts are retrieved for the second or third time.

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Thomas Wetterer February 22, 2007 @ 1:49 am

Hi Rick,

I am using Thunderbird and I get your post 2-3 times a day. And this several weeks now.

Kind regards from Germany
Thomas

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Dave Entwistle February 22, 2007 @ 2:03 am

Hi, just to add my confirmation: I've been getting duplicates of your last few (ok, more than few) posts about once a week too, in Google Reader. And this has been going on for a few months at least...

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Kev February 22, 2007 @ 4:43 am

I too have been getting multiple copies of your posts, the history is something like this -

Up to ~18-nov-06 - all fine, one copy per post
~18-nov-06 -> 22-dec-06 - two copies per post
22-dec-06 -> 12-jan-07 - three copies per post
12-jan-07 -> 4-feb-07 - two copies per post
4-feb-07 -> present - one copy per post.

I use RSS Bandit 1.3.0.42.

Hope this helps.

Kev

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Wes February 22, 2007 @ 5:35 am

I'm getting the same behavior. I'm using Outlook 2007 and there are days when I'll get 30+ copies per day. Over the past few days, it's actually been pretty low, maybe 1-2 copies per day. I just assumed this was an Outlook 2007 issue, since it had serious RSS problems in pre-release versions. But, I have to say that I very rarely get duplicates in other feeds. When I get duplicates in your feed, it downloads all 12 each time, whereas when I get duplicates in other feeds, it will be 1 or 2 articles at a time, and sometimes they'll be old ones, so I'm guessing the articles were touched in some way.

I hope we can find a solution for this. I now have 385 new articles from you from last night to this morning!

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Brett February 22, 2007 @ 5:54 am

I use Omea (and recently switched to Omea Pro); duplicates first started in September. Its sporadic when they appear as well; Its usually only every couple weeks that the duplicates show up.

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Alex Feldstein February 22, 2007 @ 5:56 am

I use Bloglines.com as my reader. I've been getting doubles of some (not all) of your posts for months actually. NBD though.

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Shan Plourde February 22, 2007 @ 6:17 am

I use Google Reader and haven't noticed any doubling up issues

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Mike Dennis February 22, 2007 @ 7:19 am

I use Outlook 2007, and I think I had multiple copies before , although not very often. Today there are about 4 copies though. I have noticed issues with other feeds lately. Some feeds have been doing that and others stopped working completely.

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Steve February 22, 2007 @ 8:31 am

Me too - from Google Reader
This probably has to do with your blogging platform rather than the readers... I'm wondering, are you going back and editing old posts? If the "lastUpdated" date of an article is changed, it can cause browsers to redisplay older articles.

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Bob Archer February 22, 2007 @ 8:40 am

Rick,

I use FeedDemon and see this problem with your feed version often. However, I have tried to comment about it a while ago an your Captcha wasn't working.

BOb

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Eric Olson February 22, 2007 @ 9:52 am

Hi Rick,

We're looking into things on our end now to see what may be happening. However, a lot of times this issue comes up because:

1. Posts are updated which then updates the pubdate/lastupdated field (as someone mentioned above)
2. The source feed has an issue (since we simply re-publish whatever is in your source)

We'll keep looking on our end to make sure it's not us. If it is - we'll make sure to get things fixed.

Cheers,
Eric Olson
Publisher Services - FeedBurner
312.756.0022 x2034
erico@feedburner.com

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Rick Strahl February 22, 2007 @ 1:29 pm

Hi Eric, thanks for checking on this. I suspect it's a combination of our two feeds mixing somehow.

I have both my main feed and the FeedBurner feed in my outlook RSS queue now and the FeedBurner version keeps doubling up as well, where the 'raw' version does not. But

I do occasionally change entries but unless I explicitly change the feed date that should not end up changing the pubDate of the feed. And it's certainly not affecting all of the posts - it looks when the problem occurs ALL of the current feed's items get doubled up...

I'm going to take another close look at what I generate here and see what I can find.

I apologize - I didn't realize that this was so prevalent. I had heard first about this a few weeks back and have made some small adjustments, which seem to be only partially working.

It's odd that there are some comments about people using Google Reader and NOT seeing the double up - while many others are.

Frankly I'm somewhat at a loss but I'll keep looking.

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Thomas Wetterer February 27, 2007 @ 3:25 am

Hello Rick,

just a few seconds ago the last 12 Feeds doubles again. I had no doubles since your tip to use the direct link you posted here.

Thomas

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Edgardo Rossetto March 02, 2007 @ 9:57 am

Yup, this problem occurs on Google Reader

re: RSS Feed Issues
by Rick Strahl March 02, 2007 @ 11:39 am

That's a bummer Thomas/Edgardo. I no longer see any feed issues in either Outlook or FeedDemon. Frankly I'm not sure what to check with Google Reader at this point. The change made recently has to do with the GUID - shortening the value considerably apparently makes readers recognize it. I'm not sure what Google could possibly be doing different to consider posts as duplicates.

Note the change was made last Friday - so one duplicated batch could be expected as the new GUIDs kick in. But after that...

The only thing that I can think of that could cause problems is some issue in the XML parsing. The XML however is valid (checked that out), so from a feed perspective there should be no issue. I use Word for most of my posts so the HTML is pretty heinous yes, but it should still work.