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Confusion About Your Blog Feed, Not Updating Properly In Gadgets On Other People's Blogs

One of the stranger confusions, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, refers to the posts feed, from our blog, displayed on other people's blogs.
I just published a new blog post - but it does not show up on my friends blogs. Is there a problem, with my feed?

When we investigate, the blog feed shows no problem. We display the feed in the browser, and compare with the blog main page - and everything on the main page is in the feed. It just does not show up on our friends feed gadgets.

So, what's the problem here? Were we imagining a problem? No, it's not imagination.

When we view a blog or website, what we see is subject to caching, on our computers.

Browsers display content, subject to caching.

Our browsers don't waste time (and bandwidth) downloading content from every blog or website we may wish to view, without checking what's in cache - in our browsers, on our computers, and elsewhere. If the blog or website in question has not been updated since we last viewed it, the browser just shows us our cached content.

With a Blogger blog, and our need to view the main page, what's in cache is simply the blog, as displayed on the main page. If no post was published or updated since we last viewed the main page, what we see is the main page, from cache. Simple enough.

Since the content of the gadgets is not cached separately, any updates to the gadgets only gets displayed when we view a blog from a Blogger server. Any gadget updates - such as newly published posts, from our blogs - will only be displayed after the blog owner publishes a new post.

Our blogs are generally crawled based on our update reputation.

If we publish posts daily - but our friends only publish weekly - we're going to see our updates displayed weekly. That's not a problem with our blogs, with our blog feeds, or even with our friends blogs - it's just how cache affects us.

Complicating this confusion, we have the issue of feed gadgets which won't display all feeds. A gadget which has 10 feeds in the list, but is set to display only 5 feeds, will display only the most recently updated 5 feeds. The other 5 feeds will not display.

As different feeds are updated irregularly, they become the 5 feeds displayed. The other 5 feeds will seem to disappear from the display.

And since other people's blogs contain content provided by other people - not just our blogs - what we see on other peoples blogs may not always include our updated content, or even our blogs at all.

We can clear cache on our computers - and see the change on our computers.

To diagnose the problems, we can clear or refresh our cache, and see if that makes our friends blogs "update more regularly" and / or "appear". This strategy is subject to limitations, though.

  • If we clear cache, this will make all of the blogs and websites load directly from the servers (not just Blogger).
  • We may be subject to caching, which we can't control.
  • Whatever we do, to force our feed to update, on our friends blogs, when viewed from our browser, will have no effect on what our friends viewers see, when viewing our friends blogs.

In some cases, we may just have to shrug our shoulders, and get to work on our blogs. And wait, patiently, for our friends to work on their blogs.

Comments

Simona said…
Hello dear! I´ve a similar problem, my new posts aren´t shown to my followers on blogger. Do you maybe know what can I do about it? My website is www.simimaus.blogspot.com
I´d appreciate your help :)
Simona
Nitecruzr said…
Hi Simona,

Welcome to California!

I'm not seeing any obvious feed problem, with your blog. I am looking at your feed - and seeing a post on 12/20. Do you have any more recent posts? Where specifically can I see the problem?
Minha Chama said…
Have the same problem from time to time...

Happened today, drives me mad... For a couple of minutes but then I go about my business.

My blog address: http://aminhachama.blogspot.pt/

My latest post (http://aminhachama.blogspot.pt/2016/05/pequenos-bombardeiros-simao-sabrosa.html) doesn't up anywhere - on my reading list on blog rolls...

Happens sometimes.
Nitecruzr said…
Hi Minha,

Thanks for your observation!

Blogger is full of little annoyances and oddities! There's actually one annoyance, that I was thinking about, just before I started typing this reply. Unfortunately, I now forget what I was thinking about, LOL!

And somebody else was reporting this issue, in the forum, just this week, It's simply one more issue, that can't be solved. MHO, anyway.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback!
Minha Chama said…
That's bad all right...

For instance, I published a post around 12:30 and still it doesn't show on my blog's reading list, on other blogs blog roll lists...

Hope, as there's no solution, that it's just a periodic case of... Well I don't know what to call it.

Funny... Whatever may be happening with my blog seems not to be happening with other blogs which I follow... Creepy right?

Thanks once again and if you have any idea of what may be happening, maybe my blog's definitions, feel free to help ;)
Nitecruzr said…
Minha,

I actually studied this issue in detail, just a few months ago. Your Reading List is one thing - and other people's blogs and their blog lists are another.

You cannot control your blog, when displayed on other people's blogs.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2015/11/blogrolls-are-good-for-casual-new.html
Thank you, Chuck, for your help.
If the caches are the problem... well... I don't know how to fix it.
I clean them regularly, yet my feeds from blogroll don't update. Ever.
They are stuck like at 8 months ago.
It's true though that I only published 3-4 posts since then.

It's a mystery to me.
Thanks again for helping so many people on the forum too.
Nitecruzr said…
Cristina,

Thanks for the feedback - and welcome to Nitecruzr Dot Net.

You need to clear the post feed redirect on each blog. That's your immediate problem.

Your feeds are in a redirect loop - so you never see an update.

https://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2013/03/clear-or-set-post-feed-redirect.html
Chuck,

Thank you so much.
It worked now.
It was so obvious... That's what happens when you have no idea of what you're doing.
Nitecruzr said…
Thanks for the update, Cristina! Good luck with your blog.

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