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RSS Lesson for the Day

This week I learned a very important lesson with RSS. Particularly with FeedBurner. A reader of this blog requested that I expand the number of posts in our feed from the default 12 to A LOT more than that. I met him half way and that created a HUGE RSS file. I did this without consulting the people that I know who are far more technically adept at RSS than I (Thomas, Amanda, Rok). Shame on me. Why, you ask?

The day after I made this edit, our handy little blog here was mentioned in a Slashdot post resulting in a TON of visits. Not one new RSS subscriber came as a result. This was curious to me and then I received an email from a reader saying that our FeedBurner feed was showing an error. The feed was too big so no one could read or subscribe.

I logged into WordPress and changed the number of posts in the feed to a more reasonable number and fired off an email to FeedBurner support. They responded very quickly saying the feed was too big.
Lesson for the day? Don’t make big changes to your blog without talking to your blog person first!

The good news is that we’re still hovering at a little over 1000 subscribers, so at least it’s not a drop.

About Lee Odden

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of TopRank's B2B Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on B2B marketing topics including content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely running, traveling or cooking up something new.

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  1. How To Blog - How To Podcast » Blog Archive » RSS Lesson for the Day says:
    May 4, 2006 at 8:19 am

    […] “This week I learned a very important lesson with RSS. Particularly with FeedBurner. A reader of this blog requested that I expand the number of posts in our feed from the default 12 to A LOT more than that. I met him half way and that created a HUGE RSS file. I did this without consulting the people that I know who are far more technically adept at RSS than I (Thomas, Amanda, Rok). Shame on me. Why, you ask?” Read More […]