Housekeeping Note

I was informed a while back that my blog feeds weren't propagating to various RSS readers.  I think most of my September posts were affected.  Travel and other obligations sort of made me put off dealing with what was broken underneath. 

It's not like I have an IT staff to go figure that stuff out :) 

You have to understand that I spend almost all my blogging effort on trying to create interesting content, and almost no effort whatsoever on the blogging platform, statistics, syndication, search optimization and so forth.

Well, I had an hour to myself, and decided to dive in and diagnose the problem.

Way back when, I told TypePad (my blogging platform) to publish full articles to Google's Feedburner, which ostensibly feeds the majority of RSS readers out there.  After a bit of digging around in a Feedburner account that I had set up over five years ago (!), I was enlightened as to what my problem might be.

My posts were too big -- both individually, and in aggregate.  In a world of short, pithy commentary, that felt a bit - well -- embarassing.

However, I was able to correct the problem, and salvage a bit of self-respect in the process.  I told TypePad to just publish short excerpts to RSS, and -- voila! -- the problem appears to be cured.  During the process, I discovered I have a *lot* more readers than appears on the traditional blog hit counter. That was a pleasant surprise ...

Regardless, I apologize for the RSS flood that might be appearing in your readers right now. 

I'll endeavor to keep myself more concise, and to the point :)

Comments

[Mark Pahl]

Chuck... I'm wondering if a by-product of your shortened RSS feeds is that now only those short excerpts are read by Odiogo. I've really enjoyed downloading your blog posts as podcasts, and listening to them during my many hours behind the wheel. But recently the podcasts have become very short (20 second) feeds. If there's any way to restore the entire podcast feed, I'd love it. Listening to you is far more productive than listening to sports radio. Thanks.

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Mark

You're probably right. I'll dig in some more and see if we can go back to full excerpts.

-- Chuck

[London Accountant]

In the spirit of being concise - thanks for continuing to blog - that's all!

[Bibet]

What the IT technician told to you? what is problem in your blogs? cause sometimes it happens in my blog to.