Working with Google’s Feedburner

While managing one of the many feeds I setup or maintain I had to claim the post in Technorati and in doing so I needed to create a post so Technorati can confirm I’m an authorized person. That post requires that I place a code into the blog, which ends up in the feed, because Feedburner works PDQ. This is not a problem on a new feed but can result in spam for an existing subscriber base.

Feedburner Troublshootize:
“As a last resort with a regular feed or a podcast, you can resync your feed. You should only resync if your feed is more than 1 hour out-of-date and pinging FeedBurner does not update it or your podcast files are not being turned into enclosures by our SmartCast service.”

Although it’s really not that drastic, the key point you should take away is that your feed MUST BE 1 hour out-of-date! I tested the ping Feedburner a number of times and it errored with a “full throttle” message.

Deleting an Item From Your Feed. It’s more like refreshing your existing feed.

Follow these steps to delete an item from your feed:

1. Remove the item from your blog’s feed. When dealing with Wordpress, there’s two ways of doing this. You can either set the item to be a draft again, or delete it. If you aren’t dealing with WordPress, this is a fairly simple task so you can probably figure it out for yourself. In general, if the post does not appear on your blog’s index, it probably isn’t in your feed.

2. “Nuke” your feed in Feedburner. You can do this by heading over to Feedburner and then clicking on the ‘Troubleshootize’ tab. Scroll down until you see the header ‘The Nuclear Option: “Resyncing” your feed’ and click the button to ‘Resync Now’. It’s kind of odd to find this option here, so that’s why I’m making a blog post about it. It was the last place that I decided to look. The option is also hidden under the page fold so it’s harder to find.

It’s as simple as that. The resync option is played up to be a catastrophic event (”nuking” your feed), but it’s painless. Your feed will be rebuilt from your updated blog feed that does not include the extra post instantly.