For a while now I’ve noticed that a few of the RSS feeds on gunbloggers.com will dump all the blog’s articles as new when they add a post. Today I finally had time to look into it, and I think I have it fixed.

The problem is that Google and Feedburner (who are now owned by Google) are replacing the permalinks to the blog postings with links to feedproxy.google.com which appears to include a random element in the URL. I suspect that this changes every time you add a post, breaking all the links and making gunbloggers.com think all the posts are new. I use the permalink to determine which posts are new and to calculate the counts for the top 10 articles so it is very important for these links to remain consistent.

But it ends up they included the real permalink inside another XML element named feedburner_origlink. I now check for that and use it if present. So, today should be the last time we see a big flood of old articles. That is until they break something else.

3/1/2009 – Fixed a couple more problems. Things should be working smooth now. I’m sure. Really I am.