Feedburner doesn't seem to check my Blogger page every half hour

Feedburner, an (RSS/atom) subscription feed delivery service, is a very useful tool for web publishers. Not only does it handle the server task of delivering feeds to RSS readers and some other tasks including keeping stats, it also includes features for publicizing your page: like widgets to put on other blogs, javascript code that can publish your blog's stories anywhere you can drop their HTML in a web page, pinging news aggregator pages and sending your blog as an email newsletter to your readers that subscribe to it.

That's a great list of features--and for my Wordpress-powered blog at diary.pacificpelican.us, it all adds up to one thing: I love Feedburner!!




However, for my Blogger-powered page here at weblog.pacificpelican.us, my problem with the Feedburner service is that even though it claims to check your feed every half hour, I have gone half a day without my feed updating. I have just pinged the service now--but that's a bit of a hassle.

Recently Feedburner, after its acquisition by Google, made a few bonus features free to the regular (free) user in a bit of Google-populism.

One of these features is enhanced stats, which is a very good upgrade.

But one is called "Feedbuner integration" for your Blogger blog. So once you install this feature, any time someone clicks on one of the native Blogger feeds [often they look something like "Subscribe to posts (atom)"] they are immediately redirected to the Feedburner feed rather than the Blogger page's native feed. Which would be a great feature--if the Feedburned feed would update more often. As it is, this "integration" (which hardly seems like a full integration in practice) actually blocks any chance at seeing new stories via the feed by making every user look at the often un-updated Feedburner feed.

And another one of these features is a customizable domain for the feed (called "My Brand")--so instead of a URL like http://feeds.feedburner.com/THEfeedname, the user have their feed come from their own domain--so instead the URL will look like http://example.com/TheFeeedsName where example.com is a domain owned by the user. But then again, I can't help but wonder whether the flaky behavior of my feeds has something to do with the fact that I have a Blogger-hosted page on a custom domain, so really my underlying feed generated by Blogger is already a custom domain and, I don't know, Feedburner may not know to look for it as often or something. (As it is this paragraph is mainly speculation as I have not seen it worthwhile to re-brand my Blogger-Feedburner blog feed URL right now.)

It might be good that Google bought Feedburner--they are certainly adding on free features for their service--but the question remains about how well they will integrate their Blogger product while also appealing to the Wordpress and Movable Type user market. For now, they seem to be leaving Blogger users--even borderline power-users of the service--behind. For use with Blogger, I used to love Feedburner.