Circular Feeding

This is a good one. When I set up my new site-wide syndication service, through feedburner, I decided to redirect my blogger feed to feedburner as well. But about an hour later, I noticed, that I had over a 100 entries in my feed, with mostly duplicates and an increasing count. Something surely was not right.

The setup: So here is what I have. Two feeds - one from blogger, and one manually created. Both were sent to Yahoo pipes, to be mixed re-sorted. Feedburner then picked the final product up, and, well, burned the daylights out of it.

The problem: When I set up the blogger redirect, the yahoo pipe data request began to be redirected to feedburner. So my pipe began with data from feedburner, added my manual feed, and supplied data back to feedburner. A pretty little infinite loop. Good thing I checked an hour later.

The solution: First things first, I shut the redirection off. Then I began to search the Interwebs for a solution. I did not do so well initially. I found a few pages that described my predicament (almost), but none that came up with a solution. I almost gave up and began to draft a post on the mosh pit called Google's help groups - when I found this. Thanks Chuck.

Turns out, when you append the modifier '?redirect=false' (without the quotes, of course) at the end of any blogger feed, the feed, doesn't get redirected. Instead you get the original feed from Blogger. Woohoo! You'd suspect something like that has to exist, considering Feedburner does not tie itself into knots for every blogger re-direct out there. Beats me why this would be such a secret though.

Here is a message to all you Blogger RSS users out there. Look for a modifier. They do not seem to be documented anywhere. Nevertheless, look for one; that will fix your problem.