Hello,

This is an issue I am unfortunately all to familiar with and believe
me I have had many discussions with the Google devs on this also.

The core issue is to help prevent bombarding the feed source with
requests Google has a caching mechanism in place that fetches and
caches the feed. While for most instances this is not entirely bad
unless you (as you mentioned) want more up-to-date content. On average
the caching is about an hour or two depending on the popularity of the
feed source but some have found that this can also be much longer and
there is no end user way of adjusting this.

This caused me to try to implement a "bust cache" param for the
content I need more up-to-date but the problem with this is by design
the feed fetcher will almost always return an error when first making
this request as they have their timeout set super fast and it just
never actually gives the feed source enough time to return the results
before the feed fetcher returns an error (while it is fetching and
caching in the background). So the bust cache param may potentially
cause the fetcher to re-fetch the feed it usually in my experiance
will return an error on the first attempt and usually cause you to
have to make another request to try to get the data. Therefore, you
may have to create a mechanism to try again if the first attempt
fails. I have had many discussions with the team on this that I
personally believe many developers would probably prefer to have a bit
of a delay (while the fetching is happening) and get data over having
a fast reply from the API and getting an error or no results. This
seems to be a behaviour they are unwilling to change. :(

This led to the feed api v2 with push updates (http://code.google.com/
apis/feed/push/), but requires the feed source to work with
PubSubHubbub (to get real time updates) and currently (since it's
announcement at Google I/O) is still in labs and requires you to "sign
up" to get another special white listed api key for your site. But I
personally have encountered several issues with this api and have
unfortunately abandoned it due to techinical issues.

This ultimately led me to using my own custom developed feed fetcher
API where I have full control over the behaviour of it. While I don't
know if this is a solution for you or one of the other things I have
tried or even if an hour or two delay in updates is sufficient enough
for you, but hopefully this helps shed some light on whats happening
and you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

One other solution I have been quite happy with is if the feed source
is a Blogger powered site/feed then use their API instead (Blogger
Gdata - Blogger feeds provide a JSON/JSONP alternative), it's just as
easy to work with and does not suffer from this issue, just that the
JSON structure is a bit different. But, this requires you to
understand JSON and parse the data your self, which is something I
have always done anyways, but if your using the wizards to generate
your code I don't know if this is an option for you or not.

Hope that helps :)

Regards,
Vision Jinx


On Sep 8, 3:50 pm, JeffP <[email protected]> wrote:
> I only found one thread in this forum addressing the issue of  the
> feed not updating correctly. And I didnt see any resolution.
>
> Is there anyway to make it so that the feed wizard is updated as soon
> as the feed has been changed?

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