Feedburner RSS feed updated + server optimization tip

Well, it appears that the last thing to get updated was the Feedburner feed. Although the cutover from Typepad to WordPress was smooth, with only a few minutes interruption in service, apparently the DNS changes didn’t propagate fully enough to satisfy Feedburner.

If you ever get messages like “The domain does not seem to exist” or “There was a problem retrieving the feed: java.net.UnknownHostException” a possible cause is DNS propagation (I surmise). Feedburner’s help recommends pinging, resynching, validating your feed, and so on, but for me, all it took was a little time — roughly 18 hours.

Which reminds me, I recently wrote an interesting piece on server optimization, specifically preparing for and responding to high traffic. Doing research for that article, I was shocked to find out what a drain on bandwidth and server resources an RSS feed can be. I ran across a large number of cases where it was estimated that anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the load and bandwidth was due to the constantly polling feed aggregators. Offloading your feeds to a service like Feedburner, or even to another hosting account or server, can have a noticeable impact. I’ll review some other tips that I ran across in the coming week or two.

Thanks for your patience during cutover, and thanks to John and RJ for helping test out the feeds.