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As a quick update for those who haven't noticed, the CSTheory blog is being only irregularly aggregated by the TOC blog aggregator. For example, my post two posts ago was aggregated, but the current post was not. Arvind over at the TOC aggregator has done as much as he can about this problem, including trying to use different blog feeds, and taking a look at the aggregator code (which he did not write). For comparison, 100% of the posts on my personal blog have been aggregated, during the same time period.

The problem does not appear to be the validity of the RSS feed, though the current post is generating warnings that I am not sure how to fix. My best guess at this point is that MathJax is the problem, because the math-free posts seem to aggregate, but the posts containing math often don't. So, ironically, the posts with the most TCS content are the least likely to be seen by TCS people.

Joe and I have discussed this. His idea is that we could run our blog feed through a feedburner, see if that cleans up the feed, and then perhaps send the feedburner's feed to the blog aggregator instead of StackExchange's feed. I have dug into the RSS feed after every blog post and tweak things, so my "blog time" over the last couple months has gone into talking to (potential) contributors, and messing with the feed, instead of generating TCS content of my own. I've also put up posts on my own blog to direct traffic to the CSTheory blog, because I know my own blog is aggregated. That is a kluge, though, and I've decided not to do it anymore.

We will keep you posted.

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    $\begingroup$ It seems that cstheory.blogoverflow.com/feed is just a redirection to feeds.feedburner.com/StackExchangeCSTheoryBlog, so the feed is already supplied by FeedBurner. $\endgroup$
    – Tsuyoshi Ito
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 16:29
  • $\begingroup$ By the way, I am not using a feed reader and I do not know what FeedBurner really is. Sorry if my previous comment was missing the point. $\endgroup$
    – Tsuyoshi Ito
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 19:10
  • $\begingroup$ The aggregator (or my reader?) messes up article links, so I would not be surprised if there were more errors. Maybe it's filtered or even moderated? After all, we would swamp the feed. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 21:23
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    $\begingroup$ @Raphael: could you be more specific about how the article links are messed up please? This is a mystery that Joe, Suresh, Arvind and I have all failed to solve, so we would appreciate any clues. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Commented Nov 15, 2011 at 23:10
  • $\begingroup$ You mean, how the broken URL looks or how it happens? They are essentially the post URL concatenated with the resp blog's root URL (in one case, it is even the address of the old blog from which the side moved ages ago). As for the reason, I have no idea. The feed does not validate, so maybe the reason is there. Can it be that RSS is generated (Main page links to "RSS feed"), disregarding that the XML claims to be ATOM? $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Commented Nov 16, 2011 at 12:38
  • $\begingroup$ Firefox gets the article URLs right if I let it visualize the feed, by my reader fails (RNews). Maybe FF is more tolerant, or my reader has a bug? It's the only feed I have experienced this problem with, though. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Commented Nov 16, 2011 at 12:40
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    $\begingroup$ I don't have any problems with Google reader $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat
    Commented Nov 16, 2011 at 23:10
  • $\begingroup$ I second Suresh. $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Labarre
    Commented Nov 17, 2011 at 8:35
  • $\begingroup$ Is this still an issue? Feedburner was set up for a bit as an experiment, but has since been ripped out (early December) because it caused several problems. If you can be specific about which posts are being missed if it happens again, that would be helpful. $\endgroup$
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 15:22
  • $\begingroup$ @Rebecca: Yes. It isn't being aggregated at all. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally, it is why I stopped focusing on this blog, and focused more on my own. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 15:48
  • $\begingroup$ and which posts? $\endgroup$
    – Rebecca Chernoff
    Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 15:49
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    $\begingroup$ The last five or six, for certain, including the most recent post. I had hoped the latest post would be aggregated, because it included no MathJax, which appeared to be one of the problems. But no. At this point, Arvind (who runs the aggregator), Joe, Suresh and I have all tried to fix this problem and failed. Meanwhile all the posts I write personally (on a Wordpress.com blog) are aggregated within 10 min of publishing. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 18:23

1 Answer 1

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Comparing the last 5 posts on the blog to Blog Overflow's Aggregation, the list is the same:

blog vs feed

Blog Overflow uses the blog's rss feed to list the latest posts, so if they are showing in our own aggregation, the source feed is listing the posts.

Checking this feed against W3C's Feed Validation Service results in a valid result.

Please make sure that http://cstheory.blogoverflow.com/feed is the url that is being used to aggregate.

Aside from that, I don't have enough information on specific details to investigate this further. Feel free to comment here or ping me on chat if you can provide further information that would help identify the issue.

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