Poll every 30 minutes? Then why not update my feed?

[Grant Barrett]

A quick log analysis shows that it is more or less true that Feedburner polls feeds every 30 minutes.

So why doesn't Feedburner also update my feed to my subscribers every 30 minutes? The only way *that* feed is ever updated is if I send a ping. I have updated my site (and my feed) all day long but my subscribers never know unless I ping Feedburner. In fact, Feedburner doesn't deliver new RSS to subscribers for DAYS unless I ping.

Please resolve this annoying problem.

Also, please fix your incredibly stupid bulletin board software that won't let a user edit a post because "You cannot make another post so soon after your last; please try again in a short while." An edit is not a new post.

[joek]

Can you send along your FeedBurner URL? We'll take a look to see if there is a problem once we have that information.

Regarding the forums: I know its a pain, but we are trying to avoid some of the spam that has been coming in lately. We'll have that fixed shortly.

[joek]

Thanks grant. I see a few items in your FeedMedic pages (under the Troubleshootize tab) but the most recent problem was on Feb 27.

The other thing I noticed is that you don't have GUIDs on your items (FeedValidator can confirmthis: http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.doubletongued.org%2Findex.php%2Fdictionary%2Ffeedburnerall%2F )

Most readers require it to track what news items have been read and which ones haven't. But other than that, I see nothing wrong with your feed.

What feedreader are you using? That may help explain some of the problem as well. In the meantime, I'll put your feeds into my own feedreader and watch for the updates.

[Grant Barrett]

I've added GUIDs. We'll see if this solves the problem. I should think that the presence of new data in a feed should be sufficient for any reasonably intelligent software to tell that a feed has, in fact, been updated.

I use NetNewsWire as my main RSS reader, but I frequently have a reason to look at in others.

[Grant Barrett]

Also, the errors in FeedMedic are clearly and completely unrelated to this issue, which has persisted since I first signed up for FeedBurner forever ago.

[Eric]

Hey there Grant. Is it possible that there's something funky going on with the time on your server? We sometimes see the type of behavior you mention here when there's a mismatch between the server clock and the file modification times ... so we'll send up an "If-Modified-Since" query, and the server will send down a "Not Modified" even though the file has in fact been modified.

[Grant Barrett]

To the best of my knowledge, the time is fine. There might be an hour discrepancy if Daylight Savings Time is not accounted for, but when feed changes sit for DAYS without being redistributed by Feedburner to my subscribers, I don't see how it could have something to do with the clock.

[Eric]

What we've seen in the past is that a server sends down a "modified" time for the feed of, say, "Mar 5, 12:00" ... then when we later submit that as part of the "If-Modified-Since" request, the server returns "Nope, not modified". That situation can persist for days because we'll *always* use that modified time of "Mar 5, 12:00" until we hear differently from the server.

Here's a good test to see if this might be the case. The next time you notice this happening and the feed is more than 30 minutes behind, go to the "Troubleshootize" tab for your feed and hit the "Resync" link. That will cause us to request your feed without the "If-Modified-Since" part. If your feed then shows up fine, that's usually an indication that there's something goofy going on with how the server is returning dates.