SOLVED

Issue: RSS feeds are larger than 1mb

Iron Contributor

Hello,

 

TechCommunity RSS feeds for some blogs have grown larger than 1MB, because the feeds pack the whole post into the <description> and keep the entire history of posts. Here's the IT Pro blog feed with the items going back to 2017.

 

Here's why this is an issue. I use RSS as a means to sending updates to different venues, e.g. Telegram channels. While having an entire blog post in a feed is preferred by many, sending a badly formatted update to another venue does not provide a good reading experience.

 

That's why I use FeedBurner to burn the description and limit it to N characters. If readers are interested in a particular blog post, they can follow the link and read it on the web.

 

Unfortunately, FeedBurner won't work with the feeds larger than 1MB. So my updates are no longer working, and I'm not inclined to deliver handpicked news to my readers in a form of entire blog posts. While it's tempting to blame everything on FeedBurner, the actual culprit is TechCommunity RSS feed settings.

 

There's no real need to keep the entire history of blog posts in the feed. Last 10-15 posts is good enough. I believe this is a common practice with RSS. I urge you to consider cutting down on the number of items in the RSS feed site-wide.

 

Thanks,

Vadim

4 Replies

Hi,
have you tried using a Telegram bot? there are plenty of them supporting RSS and you can eliminate the need for feedburner as a problematic 3rd party.

 

you can create your own bot easily.
https://telegram-store.com/blog/auto-posting-in-telegram/
https://techtickers.blogspot.com/2017/04/get-rss-feeds-as-telegram-messages.html


there are other alternatives to feedburner too, both in forms of Win32 programs and UWP apps, both on desktop and Android.

@HotCakeX the bots (even if they worked) do not have feed burning features I described above using description as an example. Telegram is not the only destination I'm interested in, and therefore the desktop/mobile apps don't cut it either.

 

Like I said, this is about the RSS feed hygiene. RSS is meant for delivering content updates, not for storing the entire blog content for ages.

best response confirmed by Vadim Sterkin (Iron Contributor)
Solution

@Vadim Sterkin 

 

Thanks for posting, we actually already fixed that. The RSS Feeds your using are the ones the platform provides out of the box, I can not change how they work. We now use a custom RSS feed i.e:

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/gxcuf89792/plugins/custom/microsoft/o365/custom-blog-rss?board=W...

 

Note you can specify the message size by changing the value at the end.

 

I think this will help you no end.

 

Let me know if I have misunderstood something and will be happy to look into it again.

 

Technical Lead

Microsoft Tech Community.

 @Allen thanks a lot! That's exactly what I need. Appreciate your help.

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Vadim Sterkin (Iron Contributor)
Solution

@Vadim Sterkin 

 

Thanks for posting, we actually already fixed that. The RSS Feeds your using are the ones the platform provides out of the box, I can not change how they work. We now use a custom RSS feed i.e:

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/gxcuf89792/plugins/custom/microsoft/o365/custom-blog-rss?board=W...

 

Note you can specify the message size by changing the value at the end.

 

I think this will help you no end.

 

Let me know if I have misunderstood something and will be happy to look into it again.

 

Technical Lead

Microsoft Tech Community.

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