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Blogs Publishing Large NewsFeeds Can Cause Problems

We're seeing a few reports, which involve blogs with published newsfeeds with large volume, producing intriguing varieties of symptoms, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.
My Followers are not getting email updates!
and
My blog does not update, on my Followers blogs!
and
My blog can't be viewed! All that I see is the gears turning!!!
All of these blog owners are publishing blogs which produce feeds, which are too large.

In general, a newsfeed can be any size necessary. There are two secondary details, however, which can make a Blogger blog, publishing a large newsfeed, problematic.

There is nothing basically wrong with large newsfeeds - but blogs which use dynamic templates, and blogs which produce feeds redirected through FeedBurner, can have problems when publishing large feeds.

Dynamic templates have problems with large feeds.

We're currently seeing problems with dynamic templates, caused by blogs with large feeds. This produces one more case where we end up prescribing a large Timeout setting, for dynamic views.

A blog, which provides the Blogger "Follow by Email" gadget (or the native FeedBurner Email Distribution gadget), uses FeedBurner to distribute email, from the blog posts feed. Large newsfeeds, when redirected through FeedBurner, can cause problems.

There are two ways to reduce feed size.

There are two approaches to making a feed smaller.
  1. Publish a blog posts feed with less posts.
  2. Format posts using Blogger post editor, instead of using Microsoft Office.

FeedBurner Help provides reference guides discussing large feed size.

See FeedBurner Help: Is there a feed file size limit? and How can I reduce Blogger's feed size below FeedBurner's 512K limit?, for details.

To diagnose a large feed problem, one can use any text browser, such as Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer, or Web-Sniffer View HTTP Request and Response Header. Either product will provide a size display.

Feeds over 512K in size will be problematic, with either dynamic view, or FeedBurner redirection.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Very good advice, thank you, this blog is a wonderful source of knowledge for those who want to solve some difficult issues on blogger.

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