Feedburner doesn’t update the feed from my Wordpress installation
***UPDATE***
Feedburner works on it’s own for the main blog feed but the category feeds refuse to update. I’ve given up on using Feedburner on those. I noticed that the documentation I had regarding the Feedburner ping service was old. I really wish that I didn’t have to browse the web searching for Feedburner help only to discover the correct ping service URL from someone beta-testing the ping service after Google bought Feedburner, but alas.
So here is the ping service URL. Works like a champ for the main feed. As for the category feeds, I stopped redirecting them to Feedburner and will just have to not get metrics on them.
http://ping.feedburner.google.com
***END UPDATE – COMMENCE OLD OUTDATED POST***
In an attempt to add Adsense advertising to my rss feed I decided the best and easiest approach would be to use feedburner. Feedburner provides RSS stats and email subscription digests so it seemed like a perfect marriage for me. My only problem was I noticed that when my Wordpress blog updated my Feedburner feed didn’t. I knew there had to be a way around it so I decided to add ‘http://ping.feedburner.com/’ to the list of update services on Wordpress’s Settings->Writing. I also turned on under Feedburner Publicize->Pingshot. I waited and nothing happened.
So I asked Google. My husband is forever making fun of me because I will sometimes type in actual questions under Google’s search. He says, “This isn’t the 1990’s, use keywords.” Instead I typed in something like “Feedburner not updating feed from Wordpress” and I found this. With that page I was able to update Feedburner but it wasn’t updating properly after a couple hours. I really can’t spend hours pinging Feedburner every 2 hours so that my subscribers can be updated so I thought there has to be an automated way to do this.
I use a cron job and curl to update my blog feed every 10 minutes to scrape for new posts that are marked to be scraped so I thought, “If I can use curl there, I can use curl here”, and I went from there.
/usr/bin/curl --silent http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain.tld%2Ffeed%2F
I have this run every hour and it does the trick. I have it go to www.feedburner.com not feedburner.google.com I am guessing because I have to be logged out. Let’s just say the cron output wouldn’t show a successful ping unless I had it go to feedburner.com.
Notes:
Replace domain.tld with your domain.
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Thanks for finding my article, you shouldn’t have to setup a cron job to manually ping feedburner, if it still isn’t picking up posts in a timely fashion (within 5 minutes) there is something else going on.
I use feedwordpress to update the blog having the feed issue. It quite possibly be related, I am unsure but this keeps things rolling until the answer hits. Thank you for your comment- it’s very true. I sometimes ignore the “I shouldn’t have to do this” just so things get done.