Feed History Problems With Google Reader & Feedburner
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Recently I began implementing a RSS feed for my webcomic AStoryADay.com. Creating an auto-updating RSS feed was fairly straightforward , and I could have easily left it at that. Visitors to the site could have simply clicked on the RSS link on my site and subscribed to the feed. However I wanted to keep some feed stats and metrics, and I felt that using Feedburner to manage and syndicate the feed was the easiest way to do this. All I had to do was point feedburner to my original feed and direct my feed link on the site to the new feedburner feed.
Everything seemed to going fine. The feed worked well in all the feed readers I tried except for Google Reader. Evidently google reader keeps all the entries for the lifetime of the feed. This is fine for the most part especially if the feed has been managed by only one person or organization. If I want to delete an entry from both the feed and google reader, I just have to reuse and update the GUID I assigned to it with either new or blank content.
However, it seems that my problems never have such simple answers. First off, apparently someone used the feedburner feed “AStoryADay”, in the past. It seems that the person stopped using the feed about a year ago and removed it from feedburner so the name was available again. But google reader still has a history of the old feed and after it lists my new entries it tacks on the old entries which I did not create or own.
This certainly makes the entries harder if not impossible to remove. So this leaves me with a few choices: (1) I could just forego using feedburner and just use my own feed without tracking it with feedburner, (2) Change the name of the feedburner url. Since I haven’t been a big user of feedburner stats in the past, I may just use my own feed and other tracking software. This would make sense because in all honestly I think it is more useful track newsletter statistics which is something I definitely want to implement. (3) My third option is to work to find a solution the problem without changing the name or feed url. This could be time-consuming and I don’t really want to really invest that much time in this small issue. So I probably won’t take this path.
On the other hand, I do think that Google is going to have to definitely give feed owners more leverage and flexibility in the management of their feeds as it pertains to google reader especially in the light of domain turnover rates.
Kim Jackson
