Be aware of this technical issue!

I know this is a food blog, not a technical one! But thought of informing my fellow bloggers so that they would be aware of this small issue if they aren't already and save them from the situation I had to face.

After few months into this blogging world I was fortunate enough to have known sincere fellow bloggers who always drop by my blog and post lovely words of appreciation/suggestions and make their presence felt. Well it makes my day! But few days before, I noticed that my blog traffic suddenly reduced and suddenly I seemed to have lost contact with my fellow bloggers who always dropped in and left their valuable comments whenever I posted something. I seemed to be missing something. But what? Everything seemed to be working in perfect order to me! Pondering over the issue made me doubt that somehow my friends weren't getting my updates. I checked with few fellow bloggers who responded promptly by saying that they were indeed not able to view my updates on their dashboard and some even said that my blog kept closing and going blank whenever they tried to visit. I even checked for updates by becoming a follower of my own blog! There werent any.As one of my fellow blogger suggested I too thought that Google Reader was getting delayed in posting the updates as it happens sometimes. Your blog updates may be visible only after a day!

But mine exceeded more than two days and still the updates weren't visible. Now I doubted I had a serious problem in my hands which I guessed if left unnoticed would even threaten the very existence of my blog. I searched google for help and came upon this link which suggested that the problem could be with the blog feed. Wow! I caught the culprit!

Let me explain in simple terms for you. Blog feed is something with the help of which your followers and subscribers get your blog updates. The Google Reader uses this feed to display your updates which is visible from all bloggers dashboard. If you have not created a customized feed, your default blog feed will be at http://name of your blog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default which your Google reader fetches to show your updates. I had created a customized feed using Feed Burner and used this feed instead of default blog feed. Hence my Google Reader was fetching my customized feed instead of the default blog feed to show my blog updates to all my followers and subscribers. If you want to know more info on how to do this you may check out link1 and link2.

But I hadn't noticed an important point when I created this feed-the maximum feed size. If you write lengthy posts the size of your feed may exceed 512K limit and then it would stop indexing and updating. This was what exactly happened in my case! To solve this issue I came across the following link that helped me reducing my feed size. I used Feed Validator to check if my feed was valid. I then updated my new customized feed in Settings->Site Feed->Post Feed Redirect URL to use this feed instead of my default blog feed. And in a few hours Google Reader picked up the new feed and started displaying my updates! It took me more than half a day to solve this issue but it was worth it. Right now my blog is up and running and I would like to specially thank the following fellow bloggers who responded quickly to my queries which helped me catch the culprit- Aruna, Ramya, Vrinda, Shabs, Vineela, Lena, Dhanya & Pooja. Thanks a lot friends..I owe it to you :)