Blog maintenance -- RSS feeds should be working again

Tammy asked me yesterday "how come you haven't updated your blog in over a week"? "Huh?", was my reply, "sure I have". Then she showed me her Yahoo! home page, and sure enough the RSS feed of my blog was over a week out of date. A quick check of Feedburner found the problem, the RSS feed was timing out. There seems to be an unwritten rule that RSS feeds must be generated and returned within 10 seconds or else the feed aggregators assume your blog is down or dead. Since Blosxom is a Perl script running in a DECnet server task it sometimes takes longer than 10 seconds to parse the entries and generate the RSS or HTML code.

A Perl whiz I am not. I tried the obvious stuff like turning off the features that don't apply to RSS feeds (such as the archive listing) but it still took too long. At the same time I was working on getting an RSS 2.0 feed set up for the folks at 9rules. To kill two birds with one stone I decided to use the Blosxom static rendering feature to generate the RSS 2.0 feed. This would be stored in a text file which the web server could ship out without needing to call the Perl script.

And, what do you know, it works. I now have to do one more manual step each time I post (regenerate the static index page) but Feedburner is happy again. Hopefully any readers who dropped off (I was wondering when you were going to notice that big fat 0 in the Feedburner box! -Ed) will re-subscribe.

I find it interesting that the whole Web 2.0 paradigm of dynamic content is no match for overly vigorous enforcement of obscure rules. Instead of being able to generate my RSS feed on-the-fly I'm now reduced to serving up a static text file just to be sure that my content is considered to be "timely". The irony of the whole thing is obvious.

Posted at 14:37 by Chris Wysocki   [/vms]   Comments | Perm Link |   |   Tweet