RSS Feed in Google Reader shows old posts?

[clafferty]

While I don't see it when I open the RSS feed directly in Firefox, Google Reader keeps throwing in old posts as 'new' into my site's feed. I am not the only person who sees this, and it's rather confusing. These are not posts I've edited and resaved or ones that have recently received comments, so I don't see any reason they would keep showing up. Any thoughts on why this is happening? I upgraded my installation to the newest version of Serendipity, hoping that would fix the issue... but no dice. My feed (as I have it loaded into Google Reader) is below. Thanks!

http://www.evilontwolegs.com/index.php? ... index.rss2

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

You might want to enable the option "Strict RFC26blabla compliance" in the s9y configuration. This disabled a feature for getting specific items due to a timestamp in the HTTP request; seems to me, Google Reader is not setting the proper HTTP headers and thus mixup new items...

Regards,
Garvin

[clafferty]

That fixed it. Thanks!

[clafferty]

Hi!

You might want to enable the option "Strict RFC26blabla compliance" in the s9y configuration. This disabled a feature for getting specific items due to a timestamp in the HTTP request; seems to me, Google Reader is not setting the proper HTTP headers and thus mixup new items...

Regards,
Garvin

I may have spoken too soon... that seemed to help the problem because old posts are not showing up again every day like they were, but they are still showing up... just as longer intervals. Any other ideas what could be going on? I've upgraded to the latest version of Serendipity, I don't believe I've done anything weird to the RSS functionality, and I've made no edits to the posts that are re-appearing. Thanks!

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Maybe we need to involve GoogleReader support in this case. What you could do when this issue shows up:

1. Make a screenshot of the googlereader page showing your screenshot

2. Open the feed address in your browser and save the XML you get, and check if the order of entries might match the one wrongly shown in googlereader.

Together with the screenshot and the "actual" XML, we might be able to deduce what could be happening here.

Regards,
Garvin

[clafferty]

When trying to take the screenshots, I ran across two interesting things -- one that might need to be dealt with before I can post the screens.

1) The articles that show up all seem to be almost exactly one year old. Is the year being saved incorrectly (or is googlereader reading it incorrectly?) Currently the post showing up is one from March 15, 2008.

2) I tried to look at the RSS feed in Firefox, but it threw an error. I don't believe this error is related to the issue at hand because it seems to be related to the smarty plugin I installed yesterday. Any issue why it would be throwing this? You can see the feed at: http://www.evilontwolegs.com/index.php? ... index.rss2

I've also pasted the error msg below.

"XML Parsing Error: junk after document element
Location: http://www.evilontwolegs.com/index.php? ... index.rss2
Line Number 2, Column 1:<b>Fatal error</b>: Smarty error: [in smartymarkupplugin:-2067564654 line 2]: syntax error: unrecognized tag: font-size: 13px; (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 455) in <b>/home/content/c/o/r/coreylafferty/html/evilontwolegs/bundled-libs/Smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php</b> on line <b>1092</b><br />
^"

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

1. That cannot be the case at last on s9y side. We output the time depending on the unix timestamp format, so there's no year that can be misassigned.

2. This is a problem in conjunction with the smartymarkup plugin that you seem to be using on your page. You seem to be having an entry with CSS-Code. Smarty uses { and } so you are not allowed to use those special characters in normal blog entries when you use the smartymarkup plugin. Do you really require that plugin? If not, you should remove it, because it's meant for advanced usage scenarios.

HTH,
Garvin

[clafferty]

Ok, I fixed the CSS problem and the feed is working normally again. I need that Smarty plugin for a post where I use a PHP slideshow... I couldn't find another way to do it. I'm sure there is another way, but PHP isn't my thing. In any case, it's working.

I removed my own site from google reader and re-added it. Looking at the posts that come up, the first is the freshest, the 2nd is a little over a year old. When I open the RSS feed in Firefox, the feed is normal... the first post is the freshest, the second the second freshest, etc. The year old post appears in the proper order, far down in the list. I viewed source on the RSS feed, and everything seems to be in the proper order and the date field seems correct.

Below is a screenshot of the date displayed from each.

http://www.evilontwolegs.com/uploads/mi ... roblem.jpg

It does appear this is a google problem. Have you never seen this before though? Thanks!

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

The problem is when you remove your URL from feedreader and re-add it, google will still use the contents from your old blog.

Google caches all requests to RSS in its database. When more than one person subscribes to the same feed, they don't have to update multiple times but only use one variant. So when you remove your subscription, the google database does not change.

If the feed is shown properly in Firefox, changes are that the GoogleReader is not properly updating/fetching your feed. It can even take them a while to reindex your page, because your RSS feed contained errors the last few days, and in this case google surely queues your page in a "state of error"-line and waits some time before it contacts your server again.

You could try to trick GoogleReader into reindexing your site by trying a URL that is not yet subscribed to, like:

Code: Select all

http://www.evilontwolegs.com/rss.php?mysecretgooglekey=0815

The Google-Reader should treat this as a special URL and hopefully reindex your page. If this feed then properly works, we can go on further from there.

Regards,
Garvin

[clafferty]

The problem is when you remove your URL from feedreader and re-add it, google will still use the contents from your old blog.

The Google-Reader should treat this as a special URL and hopefully reindex your page. If this feed then properly works, we can go on further from there.

You are very smart. That url worked fine when I added it.

But what does that mean, exactly? Did the "Strict RFC26blabla compliance" thing fix it but it was just cached? How long does google's database cache things? If I posted a new article, it would show up almost immediately in googlereader, so how does that work with caching? Thanks so much for looking into this when it's starting to look like the problem may just be that I don't know how things work.

[clafferty]

Today I posted a new article, and once again a year old post showed up as new. I ran my RSS feed through the validator that Google suggests, and it validated fine... so I'm fairly certain the problem is on their end. I'm posting to their forums to see if they have any suggestions. The problem definitely seems to be on their side, so I'll see what they have to say. Thanks for your help!

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

I'm terribly sorry for your problems, and I do hope we can find a solution to this.

There is one last thing left to test. You could subscribe (additionally!) to this URL:

Code: Select all

http://www.evilontwolegs.com/rss.php?mysecretgooglekey=0815&nocache=true

This will prevent any caching that should already be disabled through the RFC-option switch - but you never know, so let's be sure to try this one too.

When you post a new entry, both feed addresses you subscribed to should actually display identical things. If one does, but the other doesn't, that is one clue to look out on.

Until then, if the google people had some kind of log they could check, that would be awesome, too...

(BTW: you might want to temporarily also subscribe your feeds in newsgator.com service. It's free and like google reader, I use it too. I never had this sort of trouble there, but newsgator.com tends to take a few minutes more to show updated feeds)

Regards,
Garvin

[clafferty]

No reply over at google, so I ran the tests you suggested and here are the results.


Newsgator -- everything works perfectly fine there. No issues at all.

Google, normal RSS feed -- newest post at the top, a one year old post is 2nd.

Google, the RSS url you suggested in your last post -- everything looks normal except the post that should be second (i.e., second most recent) is missing completely.


Here's an image with screenshots and nifty arrows I made. Thanks!
http://www.evilontwolegs.com/uploads/misc/google.jpg

[clafferty]

here's what I posted at the Google forums, with no response from anyone. any ideas on where else i could look for help or how to contact them? thanks!



For quite a while now the RSS feed for my blog has been acting very
strangely, but only within Google Reader. Whenever I create a new
blog post, that post will correctly show up as new withing Google
Reader.. but so will whatever post was created roughly one year ago
from that date. For example, today the post I created from April 4,
2009 showed up as new, but so did a post from March 24, 2008.

I have run my feed through the validator suggested, and it validates
fine. When I open the feed in Firefox directly, all of the posts show
up in the correct order with the correct dates listed. I can only get
this problem to occur in Google Reader, and other people have
duplicated it as well.

My blog is run on Serendipity (http://www.s9y.org/), the latest
version. I have posted this to their support forums, but after
checking several things, no one can seem to find anything wrong from
Serendipity's end.

My RSS feed is:
http://www.evilontwolegs.com/index.php? ... index.rss2

Let me know if there's any more information I can supply... thanks!



http://groups.google.com/group/google-r ... 486fec7e4c

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Yeah, it's virtually impossible to get feedback from Google... sadly I have no personal contacts to any employee.

Regards,
Garvin