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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Dynamic Templates, And Jump Break

We see occasional evidence of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, from blog owners who are using a dynamic template.

Why does the Jump Break not show up, in the blog display?

or

Why can't I see the entire post?

Not all blog owners understand the limited options, in the dynamic templates.

Compare the main page of this blog, to a formatted feed page of this blog.

Do you see the differences? I use Jump Break consistently, on my main page posts. Unfortunately, newsfeeds do not include the Jump Break, because the newsfeed standard was developed before Blogger developed their post summarisation feature, Jump Break.

Since dynamic views format the display using the blog posts feed, they have no way to include the Jump Break. The posts feed contains each post, in its entirety. The "Jump Break" snippet code is part of the main page display, not the posts.

This is just one more reason why dynamic templates won't be chosen, on all blogs.

If you want to display your main page as I do, you can't use a dynamic template. Dynamic templates format their posts without using jump break. Some dynamic template "main page" views include text, broken; others include text, unbroken; and still others include only photos. None of the dynamic views include the Jump Break.

Remember that to use dynamic views, you have to set the blog feed to "Full". If you set the feed to "Until Jump Break", dynamic views won't work. The dynamic views format the post displays to the requirements of each different view (selected by the reader), and require the complete post content in the feed. Here's an example of what happens, using "Until Jump Break" - and with a Jump Break included.

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Blogger Magic - Activating The Blog Feed

One of the neatest - and easiest - ways to make your blog available to a larger audience uses a replica of the blog posts - the blog newsfeed. Most blogs, when new, have the feed activated by default.

Oddly enough, some blogs do not publish a newsfeed. Some blog owners, wondering why their blogs are not being indexed by the search engines, are perplexed.

Why isn't my blog publishing a feed?

You activate the various newsfeeds from the dashboard Settings - Other - Site Feed wizard. Routinely, you'll have one setting - "Allow Blog Feeds" - and this setting will affect all feed options equally. If you select "Custom", you can enable or disable any of the 3 feed options, separately.

• Blog Posts Feed
• Blog Comments Feed
• Per-Post Comment Feeds

Each setting will have 3 possible selections - Full, Until Jump Break, Short, None.

(Note): If you enable a feed, it is available to anybody with a feed reader, either a feed reader that they personally use, or one built in to a blog. There is no option to limit feed access - feeds are available, equally, to all interested parties. This is why feeds are not published by limited access (private) blogs.

If you fear that unknown parties might steal content from your blog by using your feed, don't publish a Full feed, publish a Short feed. This will require anybody wishing to read a complete post to access your blog, rather than reading it in their newsreader.

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Custom Domain Publishing Does Not Use The Post Feed Redirect Setting

One of the benefits of custom domain publishing, for a properly setup domain, is that the BlogSpot URL is automatically redirected to the domain. Not all blog owners realise that this redirect includes the blog feed - once the Transition period ends, and the blog is republished to the domain.

Some blog owners think that the Post Feed Redirect setting needs to be used when re publishing their blog to a custom domain. This is not true, however. Use of the custom domain redirect, plus the post feed redirect, can only result in one of two problems.

• A feed redirect loop.
• A feed URL that points to invalid content.

In neither case will any newsfeed client, such as a Dynamic Template, Google Reader, Reading List, or any third party feed program, find a feed that can be used.

The Post Feed Redirect setting is used to redirect feed references, to a separately existing feed file. It's not used where it is not needed - and with a properly setup custom domain published blog, it's not needed.

Let's look at an HTTP trace, showing the blog feed for a custom domain published blog, that uses a post feed redirect - in this case, we have the feed for "mybloggerblog.blogspot.com" redirected to "mybloggerblog.com".

Start with the BlogSpot based feed URL, for "mybloggerblog.blogspot.com".

Sending request:

GET /feeds/posts/default HTTP/1.1

Host: mybloggerblog.blogspot.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Referer: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = 74.125.224.106
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...

Receiving Header:

HTTP/1.1·301·Moved·Permanently(CR)(LF)

Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=UTF-8(CR)(LF)

Location:·http://www.mybloggerblog.com/feeds/posts/default(CR)(LF)

With a properly setup custom domain, and no PFR setting used, the next display would be the XML file, for the feed. Here, the PFR was set to "http://mybloggerblog.com/".

Sending request:

GET /feeds/posts/default HTTP/1.1

Host: www.mybloggerblog.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Referer: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = 74.125.127.121
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...

Receiving Header:

HTTP/1.1·302·Moved·Temporarily(CR)(LF)

Location:·http://mybloggerblog.com/(CR)(LF)

Now, we are looking at a typical custom domain root to "www" alias redirect.

Sending request:

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: mybloggerblog.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Referer: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = 216.239.32.21
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...

Receiving Header:

HTTP/1.1·301·Moved·Permanently(CR)(LF)

Location:·http://www.mybloggerblog.com/(CR)(LF)

And now, we are looking at the formatted blog contents - not the newsfeed.

Sending request:

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: www.mybloggerblog.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1
Referer: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = 74.125.127.121
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...

Receiving Header:

HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)

Unfortunately, the blog itself is not a proper XML file (required for a feed), it's HTML / XML.

<!DOCTYPE·html·PUBLIC·"-//W3C//DTD·XHTML·1.0·Strict//EN"·"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">(LF)

<html·dir='ltr'·xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'·xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b'·xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data'·xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>(LF)

<head>(LF)

...

<link·href='http://www.mybloggerblog.com/'·rel='canonical'/>(LF)
<link·rel="alternate"·type="application/atom+xml"·title="In·the·Studio·-·Atom"·href="http://www.mybloggerblog.com/feeds/posts/default"·/>(LF)
<link·rel="alternate"·type="application/rss+xml"·title="In·the·Studio·-·RSS"·href="http://www.mybloggerblog.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss"·/>(LF)
<link·rel="service.post"·type="application/atom+xml"·title="In·the·Studio·-·Atom"·href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/2302596229887627781/posts/default"·/>(LF)
<link·rel="EditURI"·type="application/rsd+xml"·title="RSD"·href="http://www.blogger.com/rsd.g?blogID=2302596229887627781"·/>(LF)
<link·rel="me"·href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/12619425977406185402"·/>(LF)
<link·rel="openid.server"·href="http://www.blogger.com/openid-server.g"·/>(LF)
<link·rel="openid.delegate"·href="http://www.mybloggerblog.com/"·/>(LF)

And if the feed client is, for instance, a dynamic template, the would be reader is looking at the old spinning gears. Until he gets bored, closes the browser, and emails you

Your blog is down - again.

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