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.

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.

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.

To diagnose the problem, we can clear or refresh our cache, and see if that makes our friends blogs "update more regularly". 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.

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