Resolving The Feed Too Large Error

January 16, 2009, filed under Blogging Insights


Just now I reviewed my web crawl errors using Google Webmaster Tools and found two pages were having problems crawled. I took a look at the details and found the URLs were restricted by my robots.txt file. The URLs were “http://www.homebiz.bukiki.com/feed-error-trouble-problem-too-large/” and “http://www.homebiz.bukiki.com/pagerank-update-homebiz-resource-rakes-4-from-na/”.

I looked into my robots.txt file and I remembered preventing the indexing of everything started with “feed” and ”page”. The reason I did this was to not having duplicate results from my feed and my page archive.

The information about this blog got PR 4 from N/A doesn’t need to be republished with new URL, but I think I need to do the opposite with my feed related post. So, here it is and I hope it’s still useful.

 

Feed Error! Source Feed is Too Large…

…maximum size is 512K. This is the error I was getting when I noticed that my feed wasn’t updated with my latest post. At first, I thought that it was due to the blog security precautions I implemented earlier. But when I was done rolling back all the changes, the feed error still occured. Actually, the error itself was pretty self explanatory. But the first thing came up in my mind was the changes I committed the day before. Second was, I didn’t know what to do to troubleshoot the issue.

Now, after figuring out that undoing all the changes didn’t work, I started to look for help at the FeedBurner Help Group. I learned that there are two ways to reduce your feed’s size.

  1. Through your feedburner account
  2. From your dashboard options

Through your feedburner account

You can add a variable after your original feed address. Here’s from the group directly:

    1. Sign in to your FeedBurner account.
    2. Click the title of your FeedBurner feed on the My Feeds page.
    3. On the feed management page that appears, click the Edit Feed Details… link just below your feed’s title.
    4. In the Original Feed Address field, change the address listed there from an example like the following:

      Code:

      http://myblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml
      OR
      http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

      to the following format:

      Code:

      http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=3

      (Note that max-results sets the number of posts you want to have appear in your FeedBurner feed. Any integer value between 1 and 500 is permitted.)

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

Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me. But try it, maybe it works for you.

The other way to the feed troubleshooting is by reducing the number of items displayed under the “Publicize” tab, in the “BuzzBoost” section on the left. If it fails, change from displaying full feed to just summary feed.

From your 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. Mine was 50 and currently I set it to 25…Thank God IT WORKS!

How feeds do you display? Have you got any feed problems? Hoh did you solve the problem?

You may also interested in the following troubleshooting:

Read more:
Feed Error! Source Feed is Too Large… …maximum size is 512K. This is the error I was...
Using 404 Error Page for SEO Benefits This article will show you a part of your blog...
Overcoming Feedburner’s Ping Service Limitation By default, Feedburner limits ping services to 11 maximum. They...
Blogging – Make Sure You Know What You’re Doing! As a few days ago, I had a problem with...

Tell others about the article!

Add to Mixx!

Fast and semi auto bookmark to 45 social bookmarking services!
Let me send you free updates!

What people say

3 Comments »

Ben Collison on 2009-03-05 06:00:48 said

I have had the same ‘feed too large…maximum size is 512K.’

I have just set up feedburner for a client of mine and just cannot get the feed accepted.

The blog is a wordpress blog
http://www.finewineworks.com/blog/

I reduced the Options Reading to 3, and changed to Summary Feed as well, but still getting errors.

Any ideas?

Thanks, and excellent post!
Ben

Louis Liem on 2009-03-05 11:33:50 said

Hi Ben,

I visited the blog and there wasn’t any feed found by my browser. Therefore I couldn’t see what the feeds look like. Usually when a feed presents, my browser’s RSS icon would be enabled.

If reducing the number of feeds and displaying summaries didn’t work, try disabling feedburner and go with the default feed. If nothing goes wrong and feeds are displayed correctly, then the problem is between feedburner and the blog.

Next, I’d say that there might be invalid characters or XML markup in content items, often introduced by composing your posts in Microsoft Word or embedding JavaScript code in a post (this is suggested by Feedburner itself). You can do a check using feedvalidator.org to find out the problem.

If the problem occurs, you can use the Troubleshootize section in your Feedburner account or get other suggestions from the Google Groups about Feedburner.

I hope that helps.

 
 
Luciano Mulki on 2009-05-23 03:38:21 said Subscribed to comments via email

Master! You are mi Idol, y didn`t know haw to do because my feed was too large… I fixed it doing http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=3... Thank You Very Much!!!

Luciano Mulki´s last blog post..Selecciona la MANERA en la que buscas GANAR DINERO:

 

Tell us what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
 

Author / Blog Name
E-mail (optional)
URI
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.



<<         >>

|