0 Troubleshoot RSS Issues with Feedburner Status Blog

Most of us who use Feedburner to publish our feeds have been seeing issues for the past week to 10 days. The feed count here dropped from over 900+ to around 600. And I didn’t even write something to piss you of.
It was same story around the blog world and Twitter was buzzing with tweeps talking about Feedburner. There were even posts on Feedburner alternatives.
As you may know, Feedburner was acquired by Google in June 2007. Google then started moving Feedburner to it’s own data centers that power rest of the Google applications. A month or 2 back, Google allowed Adsense publishers to move to this new platform thereby showing ads in RSS feeds.



And then Google just opened this up to all Feedburner publishers and that’s when the RSS woes started for those who were even already moved to the new platform like myself and my friend Matt of eJabs.
One thing that bothered me was that Google could have made this a little transparent and issused a warning/statement about the potential issues when they started this move. For almost a week, the publishers who were facing problems with their RSS feeds and feed count had no official info from Google.
Finally, the FeedBurner blog – Burning Questions was updated yesterday with an explanation on what has been going on at Google. Although it’s a pretty good read to learn the actions behind the scenes, Google could have done this a week back. It’s almost a reaction to all the negative buzz that has been going on and has definitely left a bad taste in the mouths of the publishers.
Here’s an excerpt from Google’s post:

It is this scale however, that makes our transition to Google’s platform technically complex, and as we have started to open up account transfers to all users, it has also amplified the permutations of publisher web server configs, service providers, feed readers, search engines, and so on, and so on

Every technical project, regardless of scale, has its own challenges and Google is no exception. But, a little proactive comunication could have done wonders.
FeedBurner Status Blog
But, a good thing has definitely come out of this – the new FeedBurner Status blog.
FeedBurner Status blog has been created to help communicate issues with the feeds and resolutions in a timely fashion. This blog will be very active during this transition period and they plan to keep it around as long as necessary.
In fact, it will be great to see their planned feature for the site where they may allow us to report our own feed issue details.

Troubleshoot FeedBurner RSS Issues
Google has published a comprehensive list of FeedBurner known issues and the solution on how to fix it. A few sample issues listed are:

• WordPress 2.7 & read timeout errors
• HTTP 502 Error code received on some feeds after migration
  
• Older known issues & workarounds

Atleast, FeedBurner is seeing development from Google unlike some other acquired products who just faded away into oblivion. I like FeedBurner and it’s ability to deliver RSS feeds via email and all the other goodies it provides.
I like the direction Google has taken with the status blog.