Bloglines RSS question

[kmsuzuki]

I've created an RSS feed that's been successfully validated by
http://www.feedvalidator.org. When I subscribe to it via the Bloglines
web-based RSS reader, all current items are correctly read and
displayed in Bloglines. My problem is that the Bloglines never seems to
read new messages from the feed. There is a new RSS file published
every 15 minutes (with new items in it) but Bloglines ignores this. It
constantly displays what was in the RSS file at the time of
subscription. I subscribe to other feeds (CNET, CNN, Slashdot) and
Bloglines regularly gives me new messages from those feeds. What's
wrong with my feed?
Feed URL:
http://snice.net/tlc_rss1.xml

Appreciate any suggestions.

 

[Michael A. Cleverly]

What's wrong with my feed?
Feed URL: http://snice.net/tlc_rss1.xml

Appreciate any suggestions.

I would say that something is misconfigured with your webserver. The
above URL returns a 0-byte file. Consider:

powerbook:~ michael$ telnet snice.net 80
Trying 207.150.221.94...
Connected to somehost.affinity.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /tlc_rss1.xml HTTP/1.0
Host: snice.net

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 08:00:28 GMT
Content-Type: text/xml
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 07:52:34 GMT
ETag: "a10bdd4b22c51:88f"
Content-Length: 0

Connection closed by foreign host.

 

[kmsuzuki]

I'm starting to wonder if I'm not fully understanding the basic concept
behind an RSS feed. My feed publishes new postings in a forum. I
check the forum every 15 minutes, take all postings that were posted
since the last check, and put them into my XML file, and publish it to
the webserver. So every 15 minutes, there is a new XML file; No two
publishings share any items.

Isn't it that easy? Am I missing something, like maintaining a given
item within my feed for some period of time (across multiple
publishings)?

 

[Michael A. Cleverly]

I'm starting to wonder if I'm not fully understanding the basic concept
behind an RSS feed. My feed publishes new postings in a forum. I
check the forum every 15 minutes, take all postings that were posted
since the last check, and put them into my XML file, and publish it to
the webserver. So every 15 minutes, there is a new XML file; No two
publishings share any items.

So your feed, regenerated every 15 minutes, shows only new messages posted
in the past 0-14 minutes? What if there haven't been any new postings
since then?

Isn't it that easy? Am I missing something, like maintaining a given
item within my feed for some period of time (across multiple
publishings)?

I imagine you'd want to republish every 15 minutes but include all the
messages posted within the last X days (where X is some reasonable number,
depending on the volume of posts and your readers expectations).

As it stands, if I'm not reading your feed every 15 minutes I could end up
missing some posts. And if there are no messages, your feed will be
empty.

Michael

 

[kmsuzuki]

I guess the net ate my response to your posting regarding the
zero-length file. That zero-length file was caused by a bug in my feed
publishing routine, and I ask you to treat it as an anomoly that
doesn't bear on this issue.

So your feed, regenerated every 15 minutes, shows only new messages posted
in the past 0-14 minutes? What if there haven't been any new postings
since then?

I do not publish a file; The file from the prior interval remains
online.

As it stands, if I'm not reading your feed every 15 minutes I could end up
missing some posts. And if there are no messages, your feed will be
empty.

Yes, I concur, but isn't this also true of feeds from most news sites
that are publishing a constant stream of news?

I'm still baffed as to my original query - why bloglines simply refuses
to re-read my feed after the initial subscription.

 

[Ben Lin]

Which RSS version are you using? 2.0, 1.0? Did you change the pubDate of the
items?

Ben
http://fadshop.net/blog