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I've posted a couple of items regarding a failure to update the feed for this blog (and the Empoprise-MU blog).
I had a chance to nose around a bit more this morning, and found this discussion of the problem. It turns out that I'm not the only person having the problem.
The discussion was started by Ryan Erickson, of the Unofficial Coast Guard blog. His feed is at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/UnofficialCoastGuardBlog. As I type this, Ryan's feed does have one update on March 29, 2009, which is a good sign. And the feeds http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Barcepundit and http://feeds2.feedburner.com/HoustonRoundballReviewDiscussesWomensHoops have March 29 updates.
However, other feeds that I checked, including http://feeds2.feedburner.com/losingmyreligionrethinkingchurch and http://feeds2.feedburner.com/CalculatedRisk, have not updated in a couple of days.
Hopefully this will all sort itself out soon, and I guess it's good that it happened over the weekend, but when the FeedBurner Status Blog has had no updates since March 11, and when there does seem to be a systemic problem with FeedBurner/FeedProxy this weekend, it doesn't exactly give you the warm fuzzies about Google's service.
And it's not an isolated occurrence. See what happened to Kent Newsome on March 13.
Since Google began to move publishers over to the Google hosting architecture, FeedBurner has been very unreliable. People have complained. And complained some more. At first, my results were mixed. Sometimes, my feed would update right away. Other times it took forever. After reading this promising post, I updated my Live Writer configuration to ping FeedBurner and some other services whenever I publish a new post. That worked for a while, but over time the delay got longer and longer and longer. Looking for tech support was futile. There is no discoverable path to any sort of meaningful FeedBurner support. All roads eventually dead-end at the ironically named FeedBurner Help Group, where frustrated users howl into the void.
Hmm...the FeedBurner Help Group. That's where I ended up.
And for a bit of history, see what Louis Gray was writing in October 2008:
[W]e are once again seeing a decimation of feed counts across the blogosphere, chopping away thousands of subscribers from popular blogs, and for the little guys, taking them down to zero.
Good point. Empoprise-BI does not get most of its traffic from subscribers at this point, so it is dependent upon its outgoing RSS feeds for traffic. Here are the things that have come to a standstill for Empoprise-BI (and Empoprise-MU; haven't checked the other two blogs):
- My recent blog posts are not showing up in my FriendFeed account.
- I could force them to show up in my FriendFeed account by sharing them via Google Reader shared items...but they're not showing up in Google Reader either.
- My audio versions of my blog posts (via Odiogo) have also ground to a standstill.
Here's to hoping that this resolves itself by Monday, and that Google acknowledges that the problem occurred.
