Mass confusion! (aka the Story About how I Thought my Feed had Died)

Yesterday afternoon, I posted on ShellExecuteEx and executing files with unknown file extensions. I was really confused, though, because my feed just wouldn’t show up in my aggregator (RSS Bandit). I knew it wasn’t my reader, though, because I had navigated to my feed’s address (http://feeds.feedburner.com/DavidMohundro) and it wasn’t displaying my added post. I threw a few test posts out there but nothing would show up. I’ll admit, I couldn’t help but wonder if something had happened with FeedBurner. I shouldn’t have doubted, though. It was indirectly my fault.

You see, FeedBurner has a nice report called FeedMedic (located under their Troubleshootize tab). I hadn’t found that report until this afternoon. It informed me that my source feed was too large.

Wha???

Apparently, my last post on file extensions was too big. I ended up editing the last post and taking out a lot of the unnecessary HTML that came out of my code to HTML addin. I ended up using Jeff Atwood’s great FormatToHtml VS2005 macro. The HTML it generates is a lot simpler, but also a lot cleaner. That solution alone dropped my post under the “large” size. Now everyone can happily see my posts again!