Tagged post not appearing in feed

December 13, 2006 10:32 AM

I subscribe to a handful of askmefi tags via RSS in Google Reader, one of which is delicious (for when people don't use the del.icio.us tag). Any idea why this post hasn't shown up in GR at all, or am I asking in the wrong place?
posted by chrissyboy to bugs at 10:32 AM (7 comments total)

It's a google reader issue. The RSS file shows it.
posted by mathowie at 10:44 AM on December 13, 2006

Ahh, monkey trumpets. Thanks for the swift response mathowie, I'll see what hoops I have to jump through to alert them to it.
posted by chrissyboy at 11:09 AM on December 13, 2006

I've emailed a friend that worked on Google Reader, seeing if he sees anything wrong with the feeds. I've tried debugging this in the past, and we thought it was maybe a timestamp issue but that didn't fix things when I cleaned it up. It's probably something minor on my end, even though the feeds pass the validators just fine.
posted by mathowie at 11:13 AM on December 13, 2006

*trunks some muppets*
posted by cortex at 11:27 AM on December 13, 2006 [1 favorite]

I'll see what hoops I have to jump through to alert them to it.

good luck. I've bugged them about the askme feeds at least twice now, as have other people.

still, it never hurts to send more feedback at them.
posted by fishfucker at 12:31 PM on December 13, 2006

good luck. I've bugged them about the askme feeds at least twice now, as have other people.

Good point, I'd forgotten about the lag in Google Reader updating the main askme feed as well. I don't mind that so much though because you tend to see things before they disappear off the front page on busier days.
posted by chrissyboy at 2:26 PM on December 13, 2006

So I talked to someone at Google. It turns out it's a side-effect of the traffic here on the server -- they don't ping ask mefi more than a couple times a day, because the googlebot at one time used to overload the server and crash it. So consequently, you'll likely see no new items for 12-24 hours then a huge rush, then nothing for half a day, then boom.

I'm almost done with a cache system for mefi and ask mefi, to offload a lot of archived pages and improve server load on the main site. After that's in place, I expect the googlebot can be cranked up again and fix this issue.
posted by mathowie at 2:36 PM on December 13, 2006