Google Reader Annoyance
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James Joyner | Friday, June 26, 2009 |
The other day, Kevin Drum noted that he was having trouble with his blog and Google Reader:
Instead of showing up a few minutes after I write them, my posts seem to sit in limbo for a few hours and then show up in batches all at once. I’ve checked the feed itself, and it goes out within a few minutes of publishing a post, so the problem appears to be with the reader, not the feed.
A discussion ensued wherein some people were having problems with his feed and not others, despite all participants using Google Reader.
I’m currently experiencing a related problem: Every once in a while, Google Reader will stream dozens of posts from a particular blog. For eample, right now there are umpteen posts from Dreaming 5GW going back months. Very odd and annoying.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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Although I don't know for sure, I suspect this issue has something to do with pinging the various blog search utilities, notifying them of new posts.
I'm not sure what Google uses to update its Reader, but unless it's told, "Hey! Look over here! I've got a new post up!" it's not going to know about a new post until it does some sort of scan or something. If several posts have gone up since the last scan, then they'll all get picked up together.
That's why, back when I was actually still blogging, I used Ping-o-Matic to hit all of the blog search/scan services whenever I posted something new.
I should note the same behavior is occuring on bloglines.com as well.
Just a hunch, but the thing James is seeing (like Stormy I've also seen it on Bloglines) may be when a blogger changes his template (or some other blog-wide change), and "republishes" the whole blog. I've often noticed that some blog posts re-appear in Bloglines if the author made even the slightest changes to the original post.
I see similar behavior for some blogs with my RSS agregator (SharpReader).
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