Google.com/ig/ and Big Feeds (over 512K in size)

I’m getting ready to move over to BlogEngine.NET and I was working with the DasBlog Converter that comes with BlogEngine.

To get this tool to work you have to set your feed to something like 1000 items your RSS feed. That way the importer can read the feed, and then pull in everything from there. Well… here’s the thing… I set my feed to 1000+ items and left it there on accident.

I use FeedBurner as my RSS feed provider and this week I noticed my feed on google.com/ig/ was showing VERY OLD posts. I couldn’t figure out why off the top of my head. After some quick investigation I saw that Feed Burner was returning a 500 Server Error. The feed was too large – it was over 512K.

This was a problem for new subscribers… I couldn’t get anyone new because feed burner was rejecting any requests because the feed was obnoxiously huge.

If you have already subscribed to the blog, you would have OLD posts showing up on Google.com/Ig/. BUT.. if you used Google.com/Reader/ or Bloglines, or RssBandit, or anything else, the feed worked as expected. But Google.com/IG/ just barfed on huge feeds.

I cut back the feed and then everything started working like normal. So, if you have weird things happening on google.com/ig/ with your feed, check your feed size!