I’ve been researching and struggling with a problem in my Unblogged Bits. I noticed the other day that … not everything I’d Shared in Google Reader was showing up in my nightly post.
Hmmm.
Presently what happens is that there’s an Atom feed from Google Reader for my Shared items that goes over to Feedburner to turn it from Atom to RSS (since the standard WordPress RSS engine, Magpie, can’t handle Atom). Then each night, a WP plug-in called “Digest Post” sucks in the feed and formats it for my Unblogged Bits post. (Per modified code given here and here.) Easy-peasy.
Well, kind of. If I’m Sharing stuff around when it does that (5:30 pm or so), it can sometimes mess it up, leading to duplicate posts. Or it may be that if something hits this blog (a comment, etc.) at that point, it also throws a spanner in the works. Again, leading to dupes. Or, sometimes, a digest with mangled links. Discouraging.
I’ve looked into alternatives at various times, but with no luck.
Anyway, I started poking and prodding into the Rube Goldberg device that is the above setup. I couldn’t find anything in the Digest Post code that would throttle the number of comments. Feedburner only showed the 20, but I couldn’t find anything there to control it. Google Reader doesn’t really have any configurations, either. (The feed is cunningly hidden in your Shared page, the link to which is cunningly hidden in your Sharing Settings which is cunningly hidden in the Your Stuff item.)
Well, much searching and reading and looking into still more alternatives later and … huzzah!
It appears to be Google Reader’s fault. Its RSS feed only carries 20 items at a time. Which means that my Unblogged Bits items can only be 20 items at a time.
That’s annoying, because I’ve already Shared 22 items today, and several more last night after the above process fired off.
So … either I need to figure out how to increase the size of Google Reader’s RSS feed (which seems highly unlikely at this point), or maybe figure out a way to make the Digest plug-in execute more than once per day.
Of, of course, I can just Share less.
Hrm.
You do seem to have a knack for finding cool stuff on the web. Your shared items are a rich hunting ground for interesting reading.
Thank you, sir! That makes me feel like the effort is worth it! 🙂
Ironically, for some reason, the darned Digest Post plugin ran twice last evening, catching some extra items I’d run. No idea why. I wish I had greater control over its running (as noted, so I could have it fire off twice), but … its workings (and why it works when it does and doesn’t when it doesn’t) exceed my technical expertise.
And it happened again, today — a post at 5 and a post at 6.
But the time is hardcoded in the extension. Once. I have it set to 20:00. Now, as I recall, it’s running off the server time on the East Coast — so 20:00 is 8 p.m. EST which is 6 p.m. MST. Which explains the 6 p.m. post. But not the regular 5 p.m. one.
It is a puzzlement.