I just came across a post by Jeremy Zawodny which clarifies some alleged issues with Yahoo’s RSS Ping Server. That post reminded me of an issue with their ping server that’s been bugging me for weeks now. The problem is that (as far as I can tell) when I ping Yahoo their robot (YahooFeedSeeker) only reads one of my RSS feeds. Apparently the ping only tells the robot to get the first feed that was registered with Yahoo. For example, when I first added my other blog to Yahoo’s RSS service I added my RDF feed (http://tradermike.net/index.rdf), so whenever I ping that’s the only feed that Yahoo reads immediately.
The problem is that people have added my RSS 2.0 feed (http://tradermike.net/index.xml) and my Atom feed (http://tradermike.net/atom.xml) to their My Yahoo! pages. So unless I explicitly remember to manually ping Yahoo for each of those feeds the people who have added those feeds won’t see my updates until the Yahoo robot comes by for it’s regularly scheduled visit. To manually ping, I have to send these:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://tradermike.net/index.xml
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://tradermike.net/atom.xml
It’d be great if Yahoo’s system recognized that it should read all of my feeds when it gets the initial (automatic) ping.
I’ve learned that the Yahoo! pings fail more than they succeed, and that’s always been the case for me. Manual pings are what I have to do whenever I post.