RSS Feed not working right now

[neilcreek]

For some reason I can't work out, the RSS feed for the site has been giving errors for the last 5 days. That means no updates from the site via your feed readers, my subscriber numbers have dropped to 1, and the automatically posted notices of new posts to Twitter and Facebook are broken. I've been updating the latter two by hand, but there's nothing I can do for those who read the site by feed.

I've searched the net to no avail, contacted my host who say it's feedburner's fault, and just now posted to the feedburner support group. Unfortunately the four other ppl who previously posted with the same problem have all had their questions ignored. I'm hoping this problem will just go away, as some people have reported happening. But I have no idea if it will or how long it will take.

In short - feed's stuffed and I don't know how to fix it - sorry!

[mpot]

I noticed that I hadn't seen any new content from your feed - but then tonight, your feed showed 6 new posts...so maybe it's fixed itself!

[neilcreek]

Thanks for letting me know that mpot. It's odd though, if you click on the subscribe link on any of the pages, you get a timeout error. Also, the subscriber numbers is currently showing 1 reader only. It seems that the feed is being served from a VERY slow connection, so is only working intermitantly. I'm glad you got some of my posts, but it doesn't look like the matter is completely resolved yet.

Here's hoping it picks up soon.

[mpot]

Neil, I can access the RSS feed without any issues - it's not responding slowly for me at all.

FYI, I've had issues with my feedburner feed count showing 0 or 1 at some times of the day too, but it normally sorts itself out later in the day.

[neilcreek]

I think I've fixed the problem, but I'm not 100% sure. I won't really know till I've had a few days of uninterupted feeds.

It seems that the cause of the problem was an upgrade to the "Yet another related posts plugin" for wordpress. They added a feature that was enabled by default, that put related posts into the rss feed. Now this seems like a nice idea, but it must have caused the server to slow dramatically as it searched not only ever post put to the feed, but every post there ever was on my blog, looking for related posts.

I upgraded this plugin along with a bunch of others duing regular maintainence of the site around the time the problems started happening, so it took me a while to figure out what "I" had done wrong. For the time being I've disabled the plugin entirely. I'll maybe try turning it back on later with the RSS feed feature disabled.

Please let me know if you have any further troubles with the feed, and thanks for your patience!