I have had an interesting problem for the past year, basically ever since I created a blog for my wife. For some really weird reason, any Google property (like Google Reader) would inject my feed from FeedBurner into her feed… even though she is not even using FeedBurner. Unfortunately, Google pretty much offers NO SUPPORT for their free products. I tweeted and posted on the Google lack-of-support forums (April, July, and November), asked on Twitter, Facebook and even Google+. I even offered to pay Google 50$ for them to fix what I knew was a bug in their system. But nothing worked… I was never able to reach anyone from Google to actually help with this problem. So what did this mean? Basically, I had to coordinate with my wife to make sure that whenever I posted something to my blog, she had a post queued up for her blog. This way her readers would not be put off by my content (at least not as much). Eventually I took some more time to troubleshoot the issue and came to the conclusion that this was specifically an issue related to FeedBurner . Since I was not able to get any help, I decided to take a drastic measure to prevent the issue from happening. I simply blocked feed burner from accessing my content entirely and this is how I did it…
I created a robots.txt file in the root directory of my website, with the arguments:
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User-agent: FeedBurner/1.0 (http://www.FeedBurner.com) Disallow: /feed/ |
But I also read that FeedBurner ignores robots.txt (at least it use to)… so to be extra sure, I added a mu-plugin to WordPress to prevent FeedBurner from getting any content.
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<?php if ( isset( $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ) && 'FeedBurner/1.0 (http://www.FeedBurner.com)' == $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ) { die(); } |
Then I published a post and waited… BEHOLD, my content no longer appears in my wife’s feed in Google Reader. I still have no idea what happened to cause Google to mix up our feeds like this, it is really quite frustrating. I had one other person respond to one of my forum posts saying that the same thing was happening to him, but for a couple of his blogspot blogs. What makes this even more frustrating for me is that I can no longer access my FeedBurner feed settings when I log in with my FeedBurner account. Also, due to this change, no one who is currently subscribed to my FeedBurner feed will receive any more RSS updates or email updates from that feed. But that’s a small price to pay to be able to post at my leisure and without having to worry about my wife’s readers getting extremely confused. I can only imagine this sort of thing happening to someone running a business, hopefully Google will find the bug and fix it soon.