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RSS Lesson For The Day
By Lee Odden
Expert Author
Article Date: 2006-05-03
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 the Author:
Lee Odden is CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing and public relations firm in Minnesota that specializes in search, social and online PR consulting and training for companies worldwide. Odden has been cited for his internet marketing expertise over the past 10 years by the Economist, Forbes and U.S. News and contributed a chapter to the book, "Online Marketing Heroes" published by Wiley. For the past 5 years he has also been the editor of TopRank's Online Marketing Blog, a Technorati 100 favorite blog and one of the top marketing blogs according to Advertising Age.
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