Blog and Ping! In case you are wondering why this blog’s front page has changed to show 4-5 posts rather than the single post as before, here is my story of the missing posts.
Since many readers may never visit your blog and read all your posts via these feed readers, missing posts due to this error is a problem. Before this current set up, I kept one full post on the index page of my blog followed by recent 10 posts. Then I pinged using Pingomatic – a wonderful free service which pings multiple blogging services with one click. But when I went around looking for my posts in news and feed aggregators like Bloglines, I found several of my posts missing.
So I sent feedback to Blogger for my atom feed and Feedburner for my RSS feed. After several emails, this is what I came to understand…
When I had one post on the index page, my atom feed created by Blogger showed one post (Currently it shows 4 posts). Then I posted another post and this single post on the atom feed was replaced by the newer post. By the time feedburner came around looking for my ping, it located the new post and missed the older post as the atom feed (showing one post) did not show it anymore. And if feedburner feed did not have it, Bloglines and other feed aggregators missed it too (due to my support for the single feed policy).
If you publish one post per hour or day, then probably you are not affected by the one post on blog principle, but if you post many posts together, then maybe you are affected too.
So this is how I fixed it –
- Blog & Ping i.e. Ping after every post. But do not try to spam pinging services. Ping tells those interesting blogging services that you have a new post and they come visiting to get your feed.
- The more faster you post, the larger number of posts you should have on your blogs main page. Suppose you show 5 posts on your index page, the atom feed will have 5 posts and there is a good chance all posts will get indexed by these services. So if you do one post every 15 minutes, the turnover of the 5 posts, after pinging will help to keep track of all posts.
Previously, if I had published 5 posts in quick succession, only 2 got indexed by bloglines. Now I have 4-5 posts on my index page which links to individual post and it has helped to get all my posts in feed aggregators.
Please note: this is my individual experience and this strategy worked for me. Check if you are having similar problems with less posts on your main page!