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RSS Redux


:P
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Quick question for everyone subscribing to the RSS feed – how’s it going now? Since the last post which dealt with the feed doubling up frequently there have been a couple of changes in the way the GUID is generated, which has solved the problem for me with Outlook and FeedDemon. Both readers where doubling up previously and stopped when the GUID was changed.

 

The original GUID value I was using was simply the full URL to the post and it looks like although unique apparently some of the readers were not reading the whole string. Now the Guid generates just the message Id plus a short timestamp and that has fixed the issue as far as I can tell with Outlook and FeedDemon.

 

However, I still am getting reports from Google Reader folks which has me puzzled. In the process of reviewing the feed I simplified the feed considerably, compared with other feeds and I simply don’t see anything wrong with it.

 

The only issue that I can now see as a potential problem is the actual feed content – the text – which is in most cases created in Word which creates heineous HTML, but seems to work OK in readers and online nevertheless. It’s possible that somehow this is causing a potential failure. However, I don’t see why this would affect uniqueness in anyway.  Another thing that could potentially be an issue is that the feed is often very, very large. I think at one point the feed content exceeded well of 500k - it's possible that these long feeds are getting truncated somewhere? Heck I don't know...

 

Generating RSS is hardly rocket science and I’ve compared with other feeds from other sites – there’s nothing here that I see that should be problematic. The XML is gen’d with an XML writer and just to be sure I’ve double checked feeds with Xml validation – they’re fine. RSS Validation tags a few content *HTML* (not actual feed XML) warnings that point at the Word markup but other than that it appears fine.

 

Anyway interested to hear if there are still problems and of course if anybody has a suggestion on what else I can check that would be great too.

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Posted in RSS  

The Voices of Reason


 

Mike
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

I am using Office 2007 with Vista x64 Ultimate, and it has been working fine lately.

Shaun Kester
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

I'm using Google Reader and will get the expected one or two posts like normal, then a dozen or more, then back to normal. ***This is since the changes mentioned some time back.

Dave Entwistle
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

I'm also using Google Reader, and I believe there was another post doubling 3 or 4 days ago... Before you get too worried, this doesn't happen only with your blog, but several others as well.

The reason I'm posting this here is that you have a way of handling such technical issues, so I'm sure you'll resolve it sooner or later... And write all about it :)

I just checked, lifehacker had the same issue a few months ago (http://lifehacker.com/software/announcements/duplicate-posts-in-feeds-problem-fixed-back-fix-in-progress-219206.php), but seems to have successfully resolved it since then. I'm not sure whether they wrote about it later, maybe you can ask? Lots of their stuff is "answer the readers" anyway, so...

From the more recent posts, Mike (http://afreshcup.com/2007/3/2/progress-report) has the same problem - note the paragraph before the last - so maybe he's on to sth there...

That's all I can think about right now, good luck!

Rick Strahl
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

Thanks Dave. As long as it's "only" Google Reader I'm not too worried for the moment. But there definitely was a problem before with ANY reader and that at least seems to have resolved. I haven't seen any dupes. The only thing that I think resolved this was using a much shorter GUID value.

That leaves Google possibly choking on the Word content which might account for why things went Ok for a while (several new posts made directly through the blog HTML interface then back to Word for the longer entries).

How about other Browser based readers? Anybody using NewsGator Online or BlogLines and also seeing the dupes?

Edgardo Rossetto
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

Seems to be fixed now, no double posts on this update.

Kevin
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

I am using BlogLines and have had no issues.

Aloha,

Kevin

Joe Brinkman
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

I use Omea Reader and the problem is gone.

Scott Allen
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

Your feed is behaving better in Outlook 2007 now, at least for me.

Shan Plourde
March 02, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

I use Google Reader, ditto Dave's comments. It's fine overall...I can live with the occasional doubling of feed items

David Neal
March 03, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

So far, so good. The last few posts have shown up in Google Reader just fine without any duplicates.

Have a good day!
David

Martin
March 03, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

I did not have any doubled posts recently! I'm using Google Reader and RssBandit. And I also checked with NewsGator Online.

Einar G.
March 03, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

I am using SharpReader. It is not working that well. I dont get doubled post anymore but it still acts like you have updated your posts. Rather anoying but I can live with it.

Einar

Rick Strahl
March 03, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

Einar... I suspect that old posts will cause problems (any before the Test post) because the guids were changed so it's possible the dates are updated. It'll probably take a little bit until the 12 feed items are all new entries that have the new GUID scheme for the online readers to properly sort the old posts out. (I hope <s>).

I'm still struggling with as to why Google Reader is not recognizing the pubDate. When I add my feed to Google Reader from scratch it comes in without pubDate dates instead showing current date time. I suspect that's the reason of the duplication, but there's nothing in the feed that I can see that should cause that.

Wes Hsu
March 04, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

Everything looks great on my end as well. With the last post about RSS, I was getting dups almost every time Outlook 2007 checked. And then one day, the madness stopped. :)

Thanks for keeping on top of this issue.

Frank Zehelein
March 05, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

Great! No two identical Messages since 24.2.

Thomas Wetterer
March 05, 2007

# re: RSS Redux

Hi,

Today I got the messages twice back to the 14.02.

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