It took me several days before I actually figured it out myself what went wrong with my feedburner. I was wondering why all this time my feeds  suddenly stopped its stream going to social network sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace and widgets’ post titles were broken unexpectedly. I thought maybe there was just some kind of delays through pinging updates in directories and aggregators. All of a sudden,  the thought of upgrading to wordpress 3.0 came into me, thinking this could be  one reason why i was experiencing this feedburner break outs. But eventually after careful investigation,  I realized  this wasn’t the culprit.

Somehow, I’ve managed to spend some time reading about Feedburner and how it actually works. Subsequently, i found out  Feedburner was later  turned over to Google. Not too long, i’ve managed to convert my feeds to Google.  Then i resorted to try some diagnostic tools available… spent a few nights of unsound sleeps, even tried updating  all the plugins to their latest version, re-fixed some plugin features, did one way or another of installing each plugin one by one, even looking at FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php file to find some glitch but still NO LUCK.  At some point,  i found  feed validator actually works this link-> http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http://techronnati.com/blog/feed/ without error. But why am i still NOT getting the right updates directly in sync with my Social Networks? Feed validator even didn’t return any errors for me to debug further. Clearly, something is missing.

When I tried pinging Feedburner through this link : http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http://www.techronnati.com/blog, this is the only time i got an error message stating,  ”We were unable to process your ping. You must ping with a URL that exactly matches the channel link (RSS) or alternate link (Atom) in your top level feed element pointing back to your website (e.g http://myblog.blogspot.com/), or use your feed URL (e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/myuri)” … now what does that suppose to mean? Seriously i have no idea.

As I went through some of the google searches one by one, i found the answer i’ve been looking for.  It’s somehow related to FeedBurner’s 512k Limit. During my testing, i didnt encounter this famous error that some bloggers are experiencing -> “Your feed filesize is larger than 512K”. But since my error is somehow related to this one, why not try this one… how can I reduce wordpress feed size below FeedBurner’s 512K limit?

Here’s what i did…

1. In the FeedBurner Account, simply append   ?max-results=#

Where # is the number of feeds that show up in the feed. Support suggests a max of 500, but even 50 should be fine.

FeedTitle: Unleashing the Techronnati Spirit

Original Feed : http://www.techronnati.com/blog/feed/?max-results=5

Feed Address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/UnleashingTechronnati

2. Enable your Feedburner FeedSmith Plugin in the wordpress plugins list and look for the feedburner settings. Indicate your feed address. If you haven’t installed FeedBurner Smith Plugin. You may want to check this out.

3. From your wordpress dashboard options

If you prefer to stay with full feed to give the most to your readers (or if the above doesn’t work either), go to your WordPress dashboard, head to “Settings”/”Options” | Reading. Look for the setting labeled “Syndication feeds show the most recent” and reduce the number. I set mine with 5.

4. Click Save Feed Details. Your changes are immediately applied and FeedBurner re-burns the newly shortened (or lengthened) feed.

Now. This is it…. I hope this article helps you.

Image credit: http://www.ciu.edu/rss