Thursday, July 16, 2009

Google Reader—Posting the Past

I love my Google reader. I keep up with all the family blogs (I think—post your blog in the comments or send me an e-mail and I'll make sure to get you added) some news sites, and some art blogs, and a boatload of Webcomics.

Recently I've taken to reading blogs about Role Playing Games—particularly Savage Worlds (I may have mentioned my fondness for this particular system before) and one of the Blog Feeds about Savage Worlds did something...strange this morning.

Every once in a while Google Reader will show me posts more than once. I noticed it on Mr. CFI most recently. But then I noticed a pattern, it's the Blogs that I follow through Blogger that are showing up twice. Once as a follower and once as a subscribed RSS feed.

So I thought I had it Figured out, but every once in a while, I still get a stray feed that shows up a late.

This morning I got a feed from one of the Savage Wolds blogs that I follow—I read it, it had some good ideas that I'm considering implementing into the game I'm running.

The feed I get it from is a little confusing at times however. This particular feed was created by another Savage Worlds Blogger at pipes.yahoo.com and I subscribed to it from a forum post on the Savage Worlds Website—it's essentially a feed made up of other feeds. The problem with that is that sometimes I don't know what feed it's coming from, so I end up going to reader and then linking to the original Blog to find out who wrote what.

I just made a decision, I'm going to go to all the blogs on the pipe feed, add their feeds to my reader and then remove the Pipe feed from my reader. That will simplify life... okay done—Sorry, this blog has turned into a stream of consciousness.

It still doesn't explain why sometimes Reader Necro-bumps a feed. For instance, the blog I read this morning was interesting but I couldn't tell where it was from until I got to the actual blog; I was reading other posts (incidentally I was going to say I was purusing the site—I looked up the word to make sure I was spelling it right and found I was using it wrong: it means in depth studying or reading, not lightly browsing) Anyway, I was reading other posts once I was there and wanted to get back to the post that got me there in the first place. I clicked on the Blogs name to take me to the Main Page and thus the most recent post—but it wasn't there. Confused I hunted it down—post date: Monday, September 22, 2008—that broke my brain, so here I am dumping said brain.

3 comments:

  1. Hmm, interesting... I use it for family blogs and handful of news IT, local, etc... sites as well. Maybe this feature exists, but I'd like to just be able (by category) tell my reader to just mark as read, if the post is over a certain age. I can always go back, I just don't want to see that I've missed 300+ posts on /. something I only read when I have lots of extra time.

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  2. Yeah every once in awhile my reader will pull a single post from the past. I wonder if maybe the author goes and revises the original post, and that flags it as new for the RSS gods. Then there was the week that TUAW refused to stay read. I kept rapidly space-baring through the same 10 posts, and then the next time I'd open NetNewsWire (A GUI front end for NewsGator, my RSS solution of choice), I'd have to click through the same 10 posts again. Eventually fixed it by just deleting and re-adding the feed.

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  3. I wondered that too, but the ones that have done it (that I've noticed) are blogger sites. And I've edited posts from the past in blogger and they don't show up in the feed (I have this blog as a subscribed feed, because I was curious about the amount of time it took to show up)—and the only way I can think of to make something show up again is to delete and then re-post. Maybe that's what is happening, for whatever reason they feel they need to delete and re-post something.

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