Tag Archives: FeedBurner

Fixing WordPress Feed timeout issues

Recently I got an email from my friend Sudheer, saying that the feedburner feed of my blog is not working. I thought it might be some small issue, but it took me more than a couple of hours to fix it. As usual, I thought of documenting it since it was an interesting problem and also someone who has the same problem might also find it useful.

WordPress feed timeout

I started the debug process by logging into Feedburner dashboard. Feedburner reported that it is not able to fetch my blog’s feed url. When I tried to open the feed url directly in browser it was loading, but it took a couple of minutes for WordPress to generate it. But both feedvalidator and feedburner said that the feed times out.

My website was loading properly and my error log was empty. I tried lot of different things but was not able to figure out why the feed was timing out.

Increasing memory used by WordPress

After a couple of web searches, I landed on a old forum thread, which stated that we should try to increase the amount of memory used by WordPress. I tried doing that as well, but it didn’t make difference šŸ™

Reducing post count in feed

Then I tried to reduce the number of recent items that were shown in my feed to 10 from the default value of 25. The feed was getting generated in some decent time and was able to let feedburner pick up my feed. But it still didn’t solve my original issue.

Unoptimized Plugin

After some more debugging, I found the root cause of the issue. An unoptimized Plugin was the real culprit.

I was using github’s gist to store the code samples that I use in my blog posts and used a Plugin to embed the code directly from github. The advantage of this approach is that, there is one centralized repository for my code samples with versioning and also github provides nice syntax highlighting.

The Plugin was making curl request to github to retrieve the code sample and it so happened that most of my last 25 blog posts had code samples and some blog posts even had around three code embeds.

The problem with the Plugin was that, it was not using WordPress’s built-in HTTP request object and also it was not caching any of the response that it got from the curl request. I quickly rewrote the Plugin and WordPress was immediately able to serve the feed in less than a second. (Will be releasing the Plugin pretty soon) Update: You can find the Plugin in its homepage

Solution

So if you are also facing timeout issues with your WordPress feed, then try the following

  • Try increasing the memory used by WordPress
  • Try reducing the number of blog posts that are disabled in your feed.
  • If nothing works, then it’s mostly because of some unoptimized Plugin.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

FeedStats, my first Android app

Just a quick note to you let you guys, that I have just pushed my android app to the market. šŸ™‚

Itā€™s called FeedStats and it allows you to get the stats of a feedburner feed url and shows the data in a graphical format.

I created this app to demonstrate how we can draw graphs in android using JavaScript in a HTML page and then embedding it inside a webview.

If you have an android phone, then you can download it from the Android market, by searching using the term ā€œFeedStatsā€. Try it out and let me know if you have any feedbacks/comments.

The entire source code of the app is available at my github account. Download and play around with it.

Posted in Android/Java | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Updated FeedBurner stats Google Gadget

I have updated my FeedBurner stats Google Gadget, to change the API endpoint to feedburner.google.com. If you have already added the gadget to iGoogle or have embedded it in your web pages, the changes will apply automatically and you donā€™t need to change anything.

The Gadget ceased to work after Google changed the API endpoint and it should continue to work after this change.

The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button. Add to Google

Let me know if you still face any issues with the Gadget.

Posted in API's/Mashup | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Google Gadget to keep track of your FeedBurner stats

FeedBurner Stats Google GadgetI had some free time this weekend and I used it to create my second Google Gadget called called FeedBurner stats. (By the way my first gadget was Bloglines Notifier, which notifies the count of unread items in your Bloglines account). It uses FeedBurner Awareness API to fetch the subscriber count of your FeedBurner feed and displays it using Google Charts API.

The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button. Add to Google

After you add the gadget, you just need to enter your FeedBurner feed URL. The gadget will fetch the subscriber count for the past one week and will display it in a nice bar graph using Google Charts API.

API’s used

The following are the API’s used for creating this gadget

Posted in API's/Mashup | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments