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Deleting a Post From Your RSS Feed

August 4, 2010 By James View Comments

I was working on cleaning up some old posts on my site earlier today and wound up accidentally publishing a post I meant to delete. If you’ve ever had this happen to you then you probably know that even if you catch your mistake immediately and proceed to unpublish or delete the post in question it’s too late, it’s already been pulled into your RSS feed.

Obviously if it was important enough to delete the post immediately it’s important enough to get it out of your RSS feed. Depending on what the content is this could range from a minor annoyance to oh my god I just crapped myself.

If you’re leaning toward the latter then you more than likely are freaking out about how to get the post you already deleted from your site out of your RSS feed. The bad news is if you’re not using feedburner to handle your feeds you’re on your own. The good news is if you’re using feedburner to handle your feeds then removing a post from your feed is quick and easy.

Step 1: After you’ve deleted the post in question from your site, go to login to feedburner and click on the feed in question.
Step 2: Once you’re in the correct feed click on the “troubleshootize” tab.

Step 3: Scroll down until you see the “Resync Now” button and click it.

Although it’s called the “Nuclear Option” it’s not nearly as serious as it sounds. The only thing the resync does is to delete all of your current archived RSS posts and immediately crawl your site for existing posts that belong in the feed. Since you’ve already deleted the post you want gone, feedburner rebuilds your entire feed without the post in question. That’s all there is to it.

For the record, I’m not saying that there isn’t a way to get rid of a post in your feed if you’re not using feedburner, I’m just saying that, if there is a way, I’m not familiar with it. If you know of a solution for non-feedburner users feel free to share it in the comments section and let us know.

Filed Under: Blogging, Tips Tagged With: Blogging, feedburner, feeds, rss, Tips

Feedburner Finally Moving All Feeds Over to Google: How to Update Your Feeds Without Losing Subscribers

January 25, 2009 By James View Comments

It’s been almost two years since Google acquired Feedburner for $100 million. Since then, Google hasn’t done much with Feedburner except stay out of the way and allow it to grow.

Google is finally moving all Feedburner accounts over to Google. If you use Feedburner and haven’t signed in recently you may want to go get the process started. On your end it only takes one click and Google does the rest.

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Once you click “Move your account now”, you’ll get an email in a day or so letting you know when the move is complete. After that you’ll need to take a few simple steps to make sure you keep your feeds up to date. Your old feeds will automatically forward to the new feeds but it’s probably not a bad idea to go through and replace your old feeds with the new one.

It looks like all feeds are going through “http://feeds2.feedburner.com/” now. Even the sites that had already updated their feeds and were using “http://feedproxy.google.com/” are being forced to upgrade again to the “feeds2″ feed.

Once you go through and replace your feeds, head over to your Adsense account and check out your new seamless integration between your feeds and your Adsense.

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It seems like most of the issues with glitches and drops in subscriber numbers have been worked out. Have you moved your feeds over yet? If so let us know how it went.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: adsense, feedburner, google, rss

RSS Etiquette

January 25, 2009 By James View Comments

rss_iconI am an RSS junkie. There is no possible way I could ever keep up with all the reading I want to do online without RSS. My preferred reader of choice is Google Reader. It’s fast, clean, easy to use and it’s connected to my gmail account which I’m already logged into 95% of the time anyway so, for me, it’s efficient as well.

I’m currently subscribed to 84 feeds (that’s trimmed down from about 200 a few months ago) and I read pretty much all of them avidly. I’m starting to get annoyed however at sites that choose only to display partial excerpts of their posts rather than the full post. The entire point of RSS is exactly what it says, Really Simple Syndication. It is supposed to give your reader the ability to absorb content anyway they want to.

nytimes_logoThe two most notable examples in my feeds are all New York Times feeds and CNET feeds. I understand that you’re trying to drive traffic back to your site but there are other ways to monetize RSS now and for a news source like the New York Times to not provide full feeds seems almost rude to me.

If old media has learned anything over the past few years it’s that the old, tired method of controlling how people get their information isn’t working. It’s why so many newspapers are watching their revenue streams dry out. Now, at least with the New York Times, they seem to have a hard time letting go of the old way of doing things.

What do you think? Do you publish your entire post in your RSS? Do you have a preference for sites that do or don’t?

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: cnet, etiquette, feeds, new york times, rss

Google Reader gets a touch-up

December 4, 2008 By James View Comments

rss-imageSince Google Reader was released in October 2005 it has been steadily eating up the RSS reader market share and now pretty much dominates the field.  Why is it so popular?  It’s simply the best RSS reader out there.  It’s fast, intuitive and user friendly.  It just jumped into the fray and started blowing the competition away.  

One of the big players at the time was Bloglines.  Bloglines became very popular, very fast because it was one of the first RSS readers to tap into the fact that rss is perfect for following a crapload of blogs.  But Bloglines is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Even the founder of Bloglines, Mark Fletcher, is fed up with the service and threatening to switch over to Google Reader.  Fletcher is also one of the luckiest men on the web.  While everyone was running around claiming Bloglines was the best thing since sliced bread, Fletcher sold the service to Ask.com (known as Ask Jeeves back then) in February of 2005 for an undisclosed amount, although rumor at the time was between $12 and $14 million.  In October 2005 Google Reader was launched.  I’m not sure how much Bloglines is worth now, but it sure as hell isn’t worth $14 million.

“Everyone has been licking their chops, waiting to get their hands on (Bloglines),” said Jim Lanzone, Ask Jeeves’ senior vice president of search properties.

Ask Jeeves is counting on Bloglines to become a significant drawing card. The company has been trying to lure traffic from the Internet’s search engine leaders, Google and Yahoo, as well as two of the Web’s other biggest drawing cards, Microsoft Corp.’s MSN.com and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL.com.

Good call Jim!

Anyway, I digress.  Google Reader has a new look with an even cleaner UI and easier to read fonts.  And if you’re still using Bloglines, or anything else for that matter, go into your settings, export your subscriptions, sign up for a Google account and import them into Reader.  You’ve got nothing to lose.  If you don’t like it after a week or so, go back to whatever reader you’re used to.


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Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: bloglines, google reader, rss

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) in Really Simple English

June 21, 2007 By James View Comments

I constantly have clients asking to explain what RSS is, what it does and why they should have it. This usually ends up with a poor attempt to explain RSS with a resignation of, “You just need it, that’s why!”

Fortunately Common Craft has put together a far more articulate video with a simple, easy to understand explanation of RSS.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: rss, tutorials, Videos