A Big Thank-MU

RSS Feeds.
Feeds, Feeds, Feeds.

We love our feeds at this church. There is an RSS feed for pretty much every piece of content we put out online, and we put out a lot of content. I have to admit, it is quite a convenient way get the information you want in this over bloated information age that we live in, the only way to avoid information overload, which in some cases can lead to insanity.

They are very convenient, until one of your feeds has an issue and you’re the tech guy charged with fixing it, then it can just be a giant frustrating mystery.

So what is this all about, well, we have many feeds that come out of our Voxpop network site. Voxpop is a site of many blogs and many feeds, but one in-particular has been troublesome, the Voxpop Master Feed. The Voxpop Master feed essentially contains all the latest blog entries from ALL the blogs on our site. The problem stems from the application we use to manage all these blogs, that application is called Wordpress MU. Now for you non blog geeks out there, Wordpress is a very popular open source application that lets you publish a blog and a feed to the blog very easily, and works very well. Wordpress MU is a version of Wordpress that lets you publish multiple blogs, and multiple feeds in one system. The one lacking feature of Wordpress MU, is it doesn’t have an RSS feed aggregator that would produce one feed from all the various blog entries. It does great publishing individual feeds for individual blogs, but nada on the one master feed idea.

So, we did what every self respecting open source user does when they meet a limitation of the software, we wrote our own master feed aggregator. Actually, a very faithful volunteer wrote one, and it worked great, put out a master feed that just about every RSS feed validation tool said was perfect. So, what’s the problem? The problem was feedburner. We use feed burner to give us statistics on RSS feeds (ie, how many people subscribe to our feeds, what is the feed traffic, etc). Feedburner takes our feed, then returns our feed to us, while keeping track of statistics so we don’t have too. Sounds simple enough, but for some reason, feedburner was having an issue with the master feed. It wasn’t automatically getting new content from the master feed. When the master feed got updated with new content, feedburner wouldn’t see it, so the feedburner feed didn’t have the new content. The only way to get feedburner to see new content, was to manually ping the feed using a tool that feedburner provides, but this is very tedious to try and do every day, so we had to find a solution.

One of the frustrations that we faced with this issue is that feedburner doesn’t really provide any information on their side as to why a feed hasn’t been updated. I mean, when we manually pinged the feed, it updated just fine, it said the feed was perfect, no problem. It just wouldn’t tell us why it hasn’t been updating the feed automatically as it was the other feeds. If there was something wrong with the feed, we would have gladly fixed it, but you need to tell us what the problem with the feed is, otherwise, we spend a lot of time just guessing and tweaking, which is where we found ourselves.

So, what now? Well, I began looking around the intertron, and found a feed aggregator plugin that someone else wrote called WPMU Sitewide Feed . Sounded interesting, and exactly what we were doing. So, we tried it out, and it worked great. It did everything we wanted, and feedburner was much happier.

So, we just wanted to say a public thank you to itdamager.com, and recommend this plugin to anybody else who may be struggling with this issue.

Thanks