I have a dirty little secret I’m going to let you in on. You see, I haven’t gotten into the habit of using Google Reader until fairly recently. I’ve been using my Yahoo home page to read my feeds. It’s a bad habit, and absolutely not recommended. A big reason why is that you often don’t get your feeds until hours or even days after they’ve been posted, if ever! It turns out that Yahoo and some of the other services can be pretty unreliable. Go to Autopinger and you’ll see how bad it can be.
I’ve quit my nasty little habit, although I have to admit, I really liked my Yahoo page layout that I have had for three years or so. The thing is, a lot of other people haven’t made the switch. Not everyone uses Google reader, and your posts may be hanging out in RSS purgatory. I know I’ve gotten emails from people who use things like Blogrolling, and they think I haven’t updated in weeks, when I’ve been writing every day! Where did those posts go?
Apparently, they are going unpinged by the service. You can fix this, though, by pinging ALL of the services at once via Autopinger. I’m glad I found this, because I think more of my RSS subscribers will hang around once they realize that I am actually posting.
*gasp* Wow, that’s a shocker. I would think the rss readers would at least ping once a day. Unlike you though, I’m not planning to do anything about it.
Kelvin’s last blog post..Vietnamese Water Puppetry
I guess I’ve never really looked in to how RSS Readers actually go out and find the information. I know the one I use is not web-based and I can check any of my feeds at any time and see when it last updated and when it is scheduled to next update. That seems to work pretty good for me, I wonder if anyone is not seeing my posts though :S
I noticed feedburner takes a hell of a lot longer than I’d like to send emails, but at least its sending them everytime. Its not terribly unreasonable of a time frame, but still longer than I’d like.
Mr Pappagiorgio’s last blog post..The Great Belgian Lager?
I tried to use autopinger, and Ive tried to register with three different e-mails. And they have never sent me one to verify, I even checked my spam folder. Very annoying, did you have this issue?
Feedburner sends out email subscriptions once per day. It doesn’t do it “on demand” - and there are very good reasons for that (it would drown under the weight of the task).
If you using Feedburner, it pings nominated services for you as soon as it picks up your blog posts (it checks every 15 minutes or so) - but it doesn’t ping everywhere, and Yahoo isn’t on the list as far as I recall.
Google Reader is fantastic btw.
Jonathan’s last blog post..Listing Books with GoodReads
Thanks for posting this, I appreciate it!
Kim @ What’s That Smell?’s last blog post..You are NOT Going to Believe This!
To Brittany - Sometimes AutoPinger works extremely well and sends confirmation emails out immediately or, it takes them a while to catch up (go figure). I have also found that the best way to ping your blog is go to autopinger.com and click on the center link “Ping Blog” and then type in your blog address and click on Ping Blog. Sometimes you have to be patient, as the system can timeout as so many bloggers are using it at the same time:-)