It can be hard to track down problems with your RSS feed and for the past two days I’ve been trying to figure out why FeedBurner wasn’t updating my feed.
Basically the problem with my feed was that it was too large as I had somehow managed to change the settings in WordPress to include the last 30 posts in the feed.
It was a pain in the ass to track down too, because the raw feed of this blog displayed in IE and could be subscribed to in feed readers without problems, yet tools like Feed Validator and the W3C feed validator insisted that there was no feed or an error.
As with so many things in this world, size is everything and in this case mine (RSS feed) was just too large. The tools mentioned above simply couldn’t handle the size and FeedBurner was so intimidated by it that it simply refused to update.
The fix, in this case, is a little cosmetic surgery to reduce the size. By dropping the number of posts from 30 to 10, everything started working again.
For future reference, if you want FeedBurner to let you on board, you may need to snip the tip a little and reduce your RSS feed file size to below 512K, which is about all it can handle.
