RSS feed readers show old news, don't update

1
votes

I'm having a very strange problem. I created an RSS feed from an XML file and hosted it on my company's site. I added new feed items (nodes into the XML file) from a C# application and I see them populate when I check the feed directly in a web browser. However, when I run my feed through feedvalidator.org, most of the time FeedValidator will show an older version of my feed. I'll change some tags or properties, but still FeedValidator shows an old version, and points out problems in my RSS that aren't there anymore.

I've had a similar problem with other RSS readers. When I run my program and add new <item>s, my IFTTT recipe won't trigger, FeedBurner only shows old news and doesn't add the new items (after pinging & resyncing), and Google Reader and Outlook don't show any new entries either. The strange thing is, my IFTTT recipe will trigger ~10 hours after I add the <item>s. A few checks:

  • I updated my <pubDate> to include the correct format with timezone (i.e. Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:11:26 CST) but still no triggers.
  • My time to live (TTL) is 2 minutes.
  • I used Atom as my namespace before and had the same problem...

I'm really thinking it has to be something with my company's server. Even though the feed does show correctly when I type the direct link of the XML file in a web browser (it shows the latest news), it seems like the file is cached somehow, for certain websites trying to read it. Does that sound possible?

My feeds:

Original http://abdataclassaction.com/Newsletters/NewsFeed.xml

FeedBurner http://feeds.feedburner.com/AbDataClassActionNewsFeed

As you can see they're totally different.

Can anyone offer some ideas? This has been killing me for weeks.

1
xmlrssfeedfeedburner
It seems like your caching theory has a high probability. Can you get someone not connected to your organization's network to run tests at the same time with you? Tracking down where the caching is happening is a different story. Good luck! – shellter
I tried checking the XML file link on a laptop not on our company's network, and I see the same file - so it seems to be up to date even if you're not on the network and you access the file directly. – Paul
1. Just finally clicked on your links. So you mean the formatting is entirely different? (The data looks the same (ish)) 2. Thu, ? the spec says use a comma? 3. Can you confirm behavior elsewhere, i.e. setup a feed not on your work network? 4. note the low follower counts for most of your tags. so 6. Maybe try posting to webmasters.stackexchange.com ? (Just giving my 2nd set of eyes to your problem sorry if I'm asking crazy questions.). Good luck! – shellter

1 Answers

1
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It seems that the server the file was on wasn't working right. When I used a server with a higher version of Windows Server and IIS, IFTTT triggers pretty quick. Seems to be resolved...