If you check out Celebrate Life via an RSS application, you might have noticed a change in the way you view my website.
Instead of getting the full post, you were only able to get the first few lines. In order to see the entire post you had to click on the more feature. The reason for going to summary was simple, for some reason Feedburner was returning an error message for my full posts.
I know quite a few bloggers that only post the summary. They do it for a variety of reasons. In fact, with a few of my websites, I opted for summaries too. However, I didn’t like it and after a few weeks, I went back to showing my full posts via RSS feed.
Showing just a summary of your post won’t automatically deter those who want to steal your content. Some of my original articles were stolen when I only had summaries enabled. With NetNewsWire for Mac, I can still view your entire post within my RSS feed. Yes, even if you choose summary. I can even comment from NetNewsWire too. I simply click on the more button, one extra annoying step but if I enjoy your website, I’ll do it.
Ok back to my RSS woes…
Just showing the summary wasn’t something I wanted to do, however, I noticed when I published my Bye bye Drought post this morning, my new post wasn’t showing up in NetNewsWire, My RSS feed reader. Now see, that is why it’s a great idea to subscribe to your own feed. In doing so you’ll most likely be able to see whether there are potential errors for those who view your blog via RSS.
Logging onto Feedburner, I clicked on the Troublehshootize Tab. The Troubleshootize Tab, opened up the above page. It was straightforward and walked me through a list of things I could do to get my service up and running again, unfortunately none of those worked. The last resort was clicking on the Resync Now button located towards the bottom of the screen, I held my breath hoping it would work, but unfortunately it didn’t. However, I did receive reasons why it wasn’t working.
WordPress There is an issue that must be addressed with your source feed
and…
Your feed filesize is larger than 512K. You need to reduce its size
in order for FeedBurner to process it. Tips for controlling feed file
size with Blogger can be found in Tech Tips on FeedBurner Forums, our
support site.
Uhm, yippee? The thing is, my file size for ten posts wasn’t that large. I know I export my WordPress files a few times weekly. Speaking of backups… How often do you back up your websites? All right back to the file size. Since I knew that wasn’t the issue, I couldn’t help wonder what on earth could be the problem? Checking the World Wide Web, I found a lot of people had experienced similar issues with new posts not being picked up by Feedburner.
How did I get the error message to disappear?
- Log into WordPress admin panel
- Click on Settings
- Click on Reading
- In Reader Settings, select a lower amount of posts to be shown in your RSS feed
By default, my RSS post view was set to 10. Initially I tried changing that to five posts to be shown in my RSS feed, since that didn’t work I chose a summary of my posts, saved my Reader settings, and my new post was viewable in my RSS feed.
Oh by the way, if you’re not following me via RSS feed, and would like to do you can susbscribe to the Celebrate Life! RSS feed. Not a fan of RSS feed readers, that’s cool you can subscribe to Celebrate Life! by Email, or virtually visit my website. Another thing, you can visit me on your mobile phone too. Now I’m not one to search the internet on my mobile phone. I use it to take/receive calls and occasinally text people. Sometimes I might take photos but that’s it! Oh, I do check out my websites just to make sure they are mobile compatible. Anyway, I recently installed WordPress Mobile Pack, a Word Press Plugin, to make my website mobile friendly.
My apologies for the short summary posts via RSS feed, I’m still playing around with various options so here’s hoping full feeds will be back soon.
Update: Good news, it looks like Feedburner is behaving itself, so full posts are enabled via your RSS feed reader.