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.