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.

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

Besides dynamic template display problems, blogs with large newsfeeds can produce problems, when redirected through FeedBurner. There are two approaches to making a feed smaller - use less posts - and alternately (when possible) format posts using Blogger post editor, instead of using Microsoft Office.

To diagnose a large feed problem, one can use any text browser, such as Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer, or maybe 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.

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BlogLovin, And Blogs Publishing Feeds Through FeedBurner

We're seeing a few reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, about BlogLovin, and their inability to accept feeds from Blogger blogs.

My feed on Bloglovin is not updating correctly, so I emailed BlogLovin Support. They responded, and said it was because my RSS feed isn't working correctly.

When diagnosed, we frequently see a working posts feed, redirected through FeedBurner.

It appears that BlogLovin is not able to properly accept some (or all) FeedBurner redirected feeds. The most obvious solution here would be to setup BlogLovin properly, to use a non redirected feed, so they get the native Blogger posts feed.

Upon trying to test my diagnosis, using my test blog, it appears that adding a blog to BlogLovin requires publishing a new post, with their Follow button conspicuously located.

Paste this text into a new blog post:

<a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/10757427/?claim=ge8y4cfhqfx">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

In some blogs it's necessary to put the code in the top of the blog post

It does not appear to be easily possible to specify the blog feed, in this case. It appears that BlogLovin extracts the blog feed, using the feed autodiscovery meta code, in the blog template.

It appears that any solution to the problem with BlogLovin vs FeedBurner redirected feeds will require involvement with BlogLovin Engineering.

1. Convince BlogLovin Support to make their service accept FeedBurner feeds.
2. Convince BlogLovin Support to make their service filter feed redirects.
3. Discontinue FeedBurner from your feed redirect.
4. Figure out how to specify a non redirected feed to BlogLovin.

I'm not hopeful that #4 has any future.

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Preventing FeedBurner Email Distribution Delay

One very useful FeedBurner service is the Email Distribution feature.

Email Distribution is virtually a turnkey subscription management. Email Distribution has one limitation, which not everybody understands, however.

FeedBurner sends out any new posts daily, based on a chosen distribution time. Depending upon what distribution time you choose, for any FeedBurner Feed, you can have anywhere from (up to) 2 hours, to 26 hours - of delay, between publishing a post, and having that post distributed by email.

To minimise email distribution delay, you choose the daily distribution time carefully - then publish immediately before the daily scheduled distribution.

1. Choose a convenient distribution time window.
2. Using the FeedBurner menu, Publicize - Email Distribution - Delivery Time, choose the corresponding daily 2 hour window, for email distribution.
3. Publish posts immediately before the start of the chosen time window.

You will still have a single daily distribution time - but you can choose an appropriate distribution window. And, you can publish just before the chosen distribution window.

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Confusion About The Post Feed Redirect Feature

The world of Blogger blogs contains a lot of confusing terminology.

Some Blogger features don't even have names. Some names, which I use, are terms which I made up on my own, years ago - simply because Blogger did not provide a name, at that time. One term, which Blogger did give us, still causes confusion. The term "Post Feed Redirect" seems to describe an option, in Blogger, to redirect the post feed to a different URL.

The Post Feed Redirect feature is used by some confused blog owners, improperly. There are several specific cases, all too common.

• Change the URL of the feed. Redirecting the blog feed, to simply change the URL, causes the feed to redirect to non existent content - or a dead feed.
• Publishing the blog to a non BlogSpot URL. Custom domain publishing provides automatic redirection of the blog URL - and by extension, the blog feed URL. Adding a feed redirect causes an infinite loop.
• Randomly expose the blog to new audiences. Redirecting the blog feed to a random redirector causes the blog readers to report a hijacked Reading List - and later, to simply remove the blog, using a redirected feed, from the Reading List.

This redirection, contrary to the term "Post Feed", also affects the comments feeds and the labels feeds, relevant to the blog where the setting is used.

Besides the fact that the option in question affects all feeds in the blog, the biggest confusion is that using the option does not actually redirect the feed - it redirects the references to the feed. People use this option in the expectation that it will change the URL of the feed. This option does not change the URL of the feed - it changes the URL used by references to the feed.

To change the feed references, successfully, you must have the URL mentioned by the setting already published, in a separate effort.

• If you renamed the blog to a different BlogSpot URL, you can redirect the feed reference, from a stub blog, to the feed published under the new URL.
• If you used a different service, like FeedBurner, to create a reformatted feed replica, you can redirect the feed reference to the FeedBurner feed URL.
• In either case, the URL has to exist, from a separate effort.

If you are reading this post, look down the page, after the "Newer Post Home Older Post" links.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

There is an example of the original feed reference. The purpose of the post feed redirect feature, long ago, was to let the blog owners generate a different feed for the blog - maybe a FeedBurner republished post feed - and force that link to reference the FeedBurner republished feed.

If you use that link, and subscribe to the feed from this blog, you should get a subscription offer, using the FeedBurner feed for this blog.

The Post Feed Redirect simply lets people setup and use an alternate feed URL, without having to update the code for all links which reference the post feed - such as that link.

That's it - pure and simple.

If you have - even unintentionally - misused the post feed redirect in your blog, it's easy to correct the mistake. Just understand why you should correct the mistake.

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Google+ Circles Is Replacing Following / Google Friend Connect

Those of you who have been Following this blog, in the past, may have recently noted a new gadget in the sidebar.

Just below the "Follow Me" gadget, you'll see "+Follow Me". The latter gadget looks the same as the former, but has some subtle differences. Some differences are visible, others not so visible. And some differences are not visible to the eye - but will still affect your access to this blog.

The Google+ Circles gadget, which on this blog is labeled "+Follow Me", appears similar to the Following / Google Friend Connect "Follow Me" gadget - but appearances can be very misleading.

The larger pictures are one obvious difference - but that's not the most significant difference. Some difference need to be discussed now, rather than later, for maximum benefit.

Following / Google Friend Connect lets your acquaintances Follow a single blog. I have several blogs, and a different group of Followers for each blog. The Google+ Circles gadget shows everybody in all of your publicly visible circles, merged together. The merged concept may, or may not, be to your liking.

With Following / Google Friend Connect, your Followers can use email, or any number of newsfeed clients, to read the complete content of your blog - including each complete post, if you setup the blog feed that way. Google+ Circle members can read a snippet of any blog post intentionally Shared, in their stream - but will have to click on the link to the blog, in the snippet, to read the entire blog post. If you have read this far, that's what you have already done.

Following / Google Friend Connect works best for public blogs - and supports a reader audience of unlimited size. A Google+ Circle, likewise, supports a reader audience of unlimited size.

With a properly setup Google+ Circle, and a Blogger blog with a list of designated readers - and your readers properly accepting the emailed membership invitation, up to 99 of your designated readers can Follow your blog. As before, the limit for private blog distribution, as for any team blog, is still 99 members.

Anybody Following a blog, using the stream of any author of the blog, will see a snippet of each post Shared in their stream. To read the complete post, they will have to click on the link in the snippet. With a private blog, the reader will have to be a blog member, to read the complete post.

Many publicly visible Blogger blogs have Following communities which vastly exceed my 4700 member population (my "Follow Me" gadget, as of April 2013) - and the possibility of losing those communities will not be willingly accepted by everybody. The integration of Following with the newsfeed subscription - and with the dashboard Reading List - is not automatic with Google+ Circles.

A blog with multiple authors (aka "team blog") will have either a Google+ Circles gadget for only one author - or multiple Circles gadgets, to fairly let people subscribe to the various authors Google+ streams. Neither solution will be exactly equal to the Following / GFC blog feed subscription - especially if the various team members are similar to me, and my range of interests.

Right now, it appears that a blog can have just one Circles gadget. How team membership blogs will use Google+ is another question to ask.

Similar to the team blog, we may wish to consider the multiple interests of each blog owner. I am one person, with a number of interests. People who have intentionally subscribed to the newsfeed from this blog, and are specifically interested in my blog about Blogger blogs, may not be extremely interested in my blog about cooking - nor in my blog about jokes, pranks, and miscellaneous ramblings. Unfortunately, if you Follow my Google+ stream, you'll get a bit of each subject.

Again, the Google+ Circles gadget appears to contain the total Followers for one person, for all interests of that one person. I have not yet found a tool that will allow me to analyse the interests of each of my Followers, and to accurately determine the specific areas of overlapping, between my own personal interests and theirs. It will be impossible for many blog owners to keep an accurate Circle complement, and segregate each circle according to interest, so they may Share only relevant material with the specific members of each different Circle.

As the Google+ Circles gadget evolves, some significant improvements - and some compromises - will be required. Like the Internet, Blogger, and Google, are constantly evolving. This may require compromises by many Blogger blog owners.

We now have a rollup discussion, where each blog owner is asked to provide their thoughts about the above described issues - and possibly, others that concern you. Anybody who experienced the Blogger GUI upgrade of several years ago may, from experience, realise how much better off we may all be, with these issues discussed now - rather than later.

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Control The Email Settings, Relevant To Your Blog, Wisely

Some blog owners don't always think about the various email settings, which are part of their Blogger blogs, and the possible effects to their email - or somebody else's email.

There are several settings, where a blog owner may enter an email address.

• Email posts to
• Comment Moderation.
• Comment Notification Email.

These settings don't require acceptance by the recipient, making for some interesting possibilities for causing problems in other people's email, as well as one's own email.

There are several Blogger dashboard settings - related to post publication and to various commenting activities - with differing effect to one's own, or somebody else's, email.

• Settings - "Mobile and email" - "Email posts to" generates a minimally formatted text copy of each post, when published, to up to 10 email addresses.
• Settings - "Posts and comments" - "Comment Moderation" generates a minimally formatted copy of each incoming comment, before the comment is published - and allows moderation of the comment, while reading the email message - when the recipient has the proper authority.
• Settings - "Mobile and email" - "Comment Notification Email" generates a minimally formatted copy of each incoming comment, before the comment is published or rejected.

Since none of these settings require acceptance by the recipient, there are various possibilities for causing interesting email delivery.

Unlike various subscription services which use email, such as a FeedBurner Email Subscription service, an email address added to any of these three settings requires no formal acceptance. If a blog administrator should add an email address, whether their own (primary or additional personal email address), a willing friend or relative, or an unknown victim's address, there is no initial email sent to the recipient

You (or somebody else) has added this email address as a recipient of "Email posts to" / "Comment Moderation" / "Comment Notification Email". Do you approve of this additional traffic source to your email service?

or a similarly worded notification / approval. Given a clueless or malicious blog owner, it's possible that one (or all) of these settings could be used to harass an unwitting third party.

The "Email posts to" feature, also known as "BlogSend", generates a minimally formatted text copy of each post, when published, to up to 10 email addresses. This setting has been used, in the past, to provide distribution of newly published posts for private blogs, as well as a simple distribution for posts from public blogs.

Since it's limited to 10 entries, BlogSend does not provide a suitable service for any blog with a reader population of any appreciable size. For a blog owner with any technical experience, FeedBurner Email Distribution is a much better solution for post distribution - when the blog in question is publicly accessible.

For distribution of a private blog to more than 10 readers, one may use Google+.

The "Comment Moderation" and "Comment Notification Email" settings, used together, can generate interesting duplication of email to one's own (or somebody else's) email service. If these settings are made without thinking, some interesting confusion can result. Email addresses can be added to each of these settings without consideration of the relationship or level of authority enjoyed by the owner of the email address, relative to the blog in question.

Comment Moderation Email is presumed to generally be a function performed by blog administrators - but email resulting from this setting will be sent to anybody addressed. A blog administrator / member - or other non administrator of the blog or an unwitting stranger - will receive email suggesting several options,

Publish
Delete
Mark as spam

Moderate comments for this blog.

If the recipient is not an actual blog administrator, the links in the email provide confusion, and no result.

Comment Notification Email might be generally addressed to blog members - but is not necessarily limited. Since notification of comments is sent separately from moderation, recipients of a notification can become confused when they fail to find the comment, mentioned in the notification, present on the blog. A blog administrator, using either an email moderation message - or using the blog Comments wizard, may or may not decide to Publish - or to designate a comment as Spam - regardless of a notification message having been delivered to each designated recipient.

Comment notification email may look similar to comment moderation email, less the comment processing options - possibly causing more confusion. A blog owner, adding his own email address to both comment moderation and comment notification, may see the combination as unknown duplication. And blog owners may confuse the proper use of comment moderation and comment notification email.

A blog owner, transferring ownership of a given blog, may overlook updating of the email settings. A new blog owner, receiving a blog being transferred, may likewise overlook these settings, and may lack the associated email, until the omission is corrected.

Either the previous owner, or the new owner, may be confused temporarily - and may wonder why they are still getting email / not getting email, until they examine and correct the setting in question. Alternately, if someone's email address was added maliciously, by a blog owner intending to harass somebody, one can see interesting possibility for conflict.

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Blogger Magic - Verifying A Blog Feed URL

It's a fairly simple matter to determine the newsfeed URL, for any given blog, by examining the blog template code.

Besides the base feed, a blog may publish an extensive array of additional feeds, which won't be listed directly in the blog template code. You may use any given feed, in networking your blog, with any Google or non Google service.

Starting with any feed URL, what do I do? I could just open my favourite feed reader, or social networking web site, and paste the URL in place. But what if the feed reader or web site wasn't working properly, or I misunderstood the instructions? What if I see

Invalid URL

or the like, what do I do?

The smart thing to do, before you setup a FeedBurner feed or any complementary non Blogger service, is to test the feed.

Many modern browsers (Firefox or Internet Explorer, for instance) will give you a formatted display, when you are loading a feed URL.

Confusion Over Community Building Accessories - Blog Feeds, EMail, And Following

A few blog owners become confused over the various community building options offered for our blogs. We see the queries in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.

How do I get a list of my Followers email addresses?

and

Why don't my email subscribers show up in my Followers gadget?

and

How do I know how many people subscribe to my feed?

These questions all come from people who don't understand the differences between blog feed subscribers, email subscribers, and Followers.

There are various community building accessories available for our Blogger blogs.

• Blog feed subscriptions.
• Email subscriptions.
• Following (aka "Google Friend Connect").
• Google+.

If you have a private blog, with designated readers, not all of these options will be as useful. Neither blog feed subscriptions, nor email subscriptions (which use the blog feed) will work for private blogs.

The native Blogger blog feed subscriptions, and email subscriptions, are pretty basic.

• People subscribe to the blog feed using any of dozens of various industry standard newsfeed subscription products. You can't count, or enumerate, these subscribers.
• You provide up to 10 email subscriptions, using BlogSend. You'll have a list of these (up to) 10 email recipients. Only BlogSend based email is available, to members of private blogs.

You can enhance the possibilities for both blog feed subscriptions, and email subscriptions, by using a FeedBurner enhanced feed.

You can make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your blog, using standard Blogger / Google gadgets. Look in the sidebar for this blog, for the orange "XML" icon. Beneath that, you will see "Subscribe to The Real Blogger Status by Email", which provides a link to the FeedBurner Email Subscription form. Next, you see the "Subscribe To" gadget, which is the Blogger supplied "Subscription Links" gadget, installed using the Layout "Add a Gadget" wizard.

Even with FeedBurner involved, all accessories won't be the same.

After you add a FeedBurner Email Subscription to your blog, don't get confused over the terminology - someone who Follows your blog using a FeedBurner Email Subscription won't be counted, or treated, as one who Follows using Following / Google Friend Connect.

• People who Follow using FeedBurner Email will not get their picture in the Friend Connect gadget.
• FeedBurner will give you a count of people who Follow, using Email.
• Following / Google Friend Connect will give you a count of people who Follow / Join your blog.
• Some people may do both - but don't expect this to be normal.

If you redirect the blog feed to FeedBurner, you can see statistics about everybody who reads your blog in their newsfeed reader. The FeedBurner statistics will be different from the Following / Google Friend Connect count, and from the FeedBurner Email subscriber count and list.

• People who subscribe to the FeedBurner feed using "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" will read the blog feed in their newsfeed readers - not in their email.
• People who read the redirected blog feed using their newsfeed readers will be counted in the FeedBurner statistics, but they will not provide their email address - so they won't be listed in the FeedBurner "Subscriber Management" list.
• Both people who Follow / Join the blog, using Following / Google Friend Connect, and people who use the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" link will be redirected to the FeedBurner feed, and contribute to the FeedBurner statistics.

So enjoy the convenience to you, and to your potential Followers - but understand what they, and you, get - and don't get. You'll have up to three different counts, to consider.

• FeedBurner Email Subscribers. You can get an email address list, of email subscribers.
• FeedBurner Newsfeed Subscribers. You can get FeedBurner Statistics, about newsfeed subscribers.
• Following / Friend Connect Members. You can see pictures and profiles of Members, who do not Follow anonymously.

Finally, people can follow you using your stream, in Google+. If you Share your posts when you publish, your posts will go into your Google+ stream, and be visible to anybody Following you there. Sometime in the future, Google+ Circles may replace Following / Friend Connect.

If you include a Google+ Followers gadget on your blog, your Followers may get their pictures on your blog, similar to Following / Google Friend Connect. And you can use Google+, and restricted Google+ Circles, with a private blog - an option not available using the blog feed.

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