December 7, 2006

Apologies for the repeat feedcast!

Today, I noticed that my label "beta hacks" had grown really big with lot of posts. So, I decided to move some of the posts to different label and adjust some other labels. I did that and what I saw later got me really irritated. All the posts for which I changed labels had been brought up in my post feed. I think many of you might see a repeat telecast of these posts in your feed readers. Please accept my apologies if you are irritated by this. And Blogger folks - you have failed to think through this :(

I knew already that changing post title or content will move the post up in the feed because feed orders posts by updation date and not published date. So, I was updating old posts only when I felt it was absolutely necessary. But I never expected that changing labels will also result in this messup. What has labels got to do with post updation? In my opinion, labels are something that helps in organizing the blog and shouldn't be considered as part of the post. Yes, they appear in the feed under category tag but I can't accept a change in label affecting the feed. I hope Blogger folks will rethink about this.

Want to update labels? - think twice!

While we are in the topic of feeds, let me also clarify one more thing. The reason why I provide only summary feed for posts is because I have hack code in many of my posts. I am not sure how it will appear in the numerous choices of feed readers out there. I don't want somebody picking up erroneous code from a feedreader (even an extra space matters!) and finds that the hack doesn't work for him/her. I check and double check the code that appears in my blog and so I would like you to pick up the code from my blog. Also, I believe you wouldn't mind visiting my blog often because it makes your blog better ;)

6 comments:

Brainiac said...

check it

Update Feed

Unknown said...

Brainiac,

I had read this post. But I was not sure about disabling smartfeed and providing only RSS2.0 feed. In any case, Blogger's original feed itself behaves like this even if you don't use Feedburner.

PurpleMoggy said...

Yeah, that was just a little fix for getting the published date to stay the published date, and not become the updated date.

Blogger obviously hasn't thought this through. It makes absolutely no sense to push updated posts to the top of a new post feed. If they wanted to, they could make a separate updated post feed, but this is just ridiculous.

Vivek Sanghi said...

Good point Ramani. Blogger needs to fix the feeds so that the posts are picked up by their publish date. Using blogger feed for podcasts via talkr has been very messy for me because of this issue.

Matthew said...

Ramani,

Just a question of what (I assume) is a simple hack: I want my blog to be aligned left, not centered. How can I do that? Thanks!

Susan Borgas said...

Hello I love your blog and will be back often to pick up some tips. When I updated my labels I did it through Posting/Edit Posts section of my blog. I ticked each post that I wanted to apply the label to and chose it through the Select label action box. I have feeds of my own blog to keep an eye on them and found I had no flood of updates with my feeds. Not sure if this is of any help to anyone.