Google Reader cache-ing feed behavior
In the last couple months I’ve been “farming out” several domains from the averyjparker.com site. I previously hosted my South Carolina Genealogy, North Carolina Genealogy and Online Radio TV sites all in the same virtual server as averyjparker.com. Well, I’ve noticed some strange behavior from Google Reader as a result…. read on.
I didn’t notice until the move of the last site. They are all wordpress style blogs and the rss feed is at domain.name/feed for each one. I have a 404 redirect handler that redirects requests for pages that DON’T exist under the averyjparker.com domain back to the main page at averyjparker.com so… I assume that when the google feed fetcher came looking for northcarolinagenealogy.net/feed in the 3-4 hour dns propagation gap… it found averyjparker.com/feed instead.
In my google reader account I saw the northcarolinagenealogy.net feed listed, but the content items were from averyjparker.com. I even saw this a day after the move. So, the feed has now updated and I see a mix of the northcarolinagenealogy.net feed items and averyjparker.com feed items. So, instead of looking at the feed as a whole, google has cached a portion of what they saw last time and are only pulling in the “new since last time” posts. Ultimately it will settle out as the old posts expire, but this was an annoying side effect.
Now that those domains have moved it’s time for some webspace spring cleaning.