RSS Feeds: sponsors heads up
 

I have a list (which needs a little updating) of RSS feeds of which I'm currently aware. Several of these are marked "check dates" as a warning that they do not appear to be being updated. One sponsor took me to task because he claimed his feeds were being updated. And we was right, but here is what I discovered.

A few sponsors are adding new posts to the end of their existing feed file. This isn't a problem if your affiliates have their feedreaders/aggregators set to read the whole of a feed each time they pull it, but especially for those pulling in several feeds, that is a grossly slow and inefficient way to proceed. So many, reasonably the majority, set to read - say - the latest 5, 10 or 20 entries. Such limits are almost certainly going to catch any new entries when feeds are being scanned once or twice a day, so that approach makes sense.

The snag is that most if not all readers don't actually identify the latest feeds. To do that, they might have to read the whole feed, which would defeat the object of the exercise. They in fact read the first # entries.

If those entries are your oldest ones, then to all practical intents and purposes, to all those people reading your feeds with limits set, you have no new posts. To prevent this possibility, you must add new entries at the top of your files...

nice catch jayeff, on top of shit as usual :)

The sad thing is that the majority of sponsors affected wouldn't even understand exactly what you just said, if they actually took the time to read your post.

What's even worse, the solution is probably as simple as putting " ORDER BY date DESC" at the end of their sql.

*shrug*

Finally, but this also demonstrates the risk of trusting automation too far. I had simply believed what my feedreader was telling me, in this case that there were no new articles. It wasn't until someone insisted there were, that I started looking around under the hood as it were.

There are only a handful of sponsors affected and their feeds will be being picked up by people who don't use limits. Even so, I would be very surprized if their traffic isn't bad enough to have caused them to wonder if RSS feeds are worth the trouble :)

thanks for the info.

Sad but true IMHO. Common sense seldom seems to prevail. I doubt I would take the time to point that out to a sponsor unless it was exceptional content that produced well.

not to worry with the WEGCash feeds! We get the job done right! :thumbsup

The latest updates show first before the older entries:

http://www.adultpornblog.com/archive...EGID&track=AAA

If anyone needs any help with our feeds, please make sure to hit me up

ICQ #233-854-608
Email [email protected]

Ruth :thumbsup

I can't count the times that I have been the exact same situation and just gave up on the feed all together, now you are making me go back through....and sure enough, I am seeing this exact issue

sad but true.

here's the one I do for reality cash
http://blog4adults.com/reality/rss-f...?aff=vendzilla

Just use your realitycash user name instead of vendzilla

Or you can just link to the blog like this
http://blog4adults.com/reality/index.php?aff=vendzilla

:thumbsup :thumbsup Double thumbs up, most sponsors just throw up a feed to put a nice blinking "We have RSS" on their mainpage and don't really care if it's usable or not...and while you mentioned an important point, most feeds are a terrible failure for much simpler reasons...like missing links for example, hilarious !

you will appreciate our rss feeds based on your post. they seem to meet your standards and then some and i hope you will try them and let us know your feedback as well.

test-drive here: http://rss.xpays.com/xvn_rss.cgi?a=12345

I have couple other issues for RSS feeds (particularly blog entries):

1 - many feeds I see have traffic leaks on them. Often the permalink or story link does not have the full affilliate code on it. That can be a real issue, because using feedwordpress can lead to having the headline linked without the affiliate code.

2 - Not all types of media are easy for feed processing programs to handle. Video inserts (especially youtube style) just plain don't work most of the time.

3 - If you run multiple feeds or multiple sites, don't release all your new posts with exactly the same time and date stamp. Stagger your posts over the whole 24 clock! if two of your feeds are being used together, your posts will end up all together, which isn't all that attractive.

3a - if you are making multiple posts on the same blog feed, spread them over the day and week as well. 7 posts all with the exact same time and date isn't a weeks worth of updates, but rather a major waste of your efforts.

Good luck to everyone :)

If this thread is going to expand to other issues, this is a good one. There is a suspiciously high number of feeds with either the headline and/or a site-link at the end of the post, missing affiliate code. Too many to believe that all are simple mistakes...

Jayeff, I learned today that one of a few companies are setting up blog feeds for programs, and it would appear that this "flaw" is pretty common. It is a huge traffic leak, similar to having one of of every 3 join links on a tour without an affiliate code, example.

I even found one sponsor having thumbs/pics without affiliate codes linked to galleries....not all, just one every 5-10 posts, all others include the affiliate code correctly. I first thought it's a bug, manually edited it, but it's repeats over 90+ posts.

Mailed them 5 times, no reply so far...

Took me weeks to find out because I don't check every single post, but it's looks pretty fishy...I'll try to get some response, if it isn't fixed soon it's DRAMA TIME :1orglaugh

Wow, very sad if they are doing this.

Good catch.

Check the feed in my sig. All new posts are added to the top, you can also adjust how many posts you want to pull as well as the thumb sizes of the pics all the way up to 450 pixels. A few other things also.

http://beachmodel.com/webmasters/index.php

Yup, it's a real quality feed, well written text, very customizable, using it on several sites and never ever had a single problem with it. :thumbsup