Netvibes sees hidden stuff

[corentin]

Dear all,

I've tried to find a solution on this and other forums for my problems but until now it's failed.

here's the problem:
- me & some colleagues are preparing to launch a professional blog
- we've prepared written like 15 posts in advance, put most of them offline and programmed their publication for the next weeks, leaving only 4 posts published on the blog.
- we've tried to "go public" today but when we added the RSS 2.0 feed to Netvibes (for testing purposes), it found ALL the posts, including hidden, un-published ones. It mentions the initial date of publication. Google reader works fine but I fail to have Netvibes show what we want it to show. Even if I delete the post, Netvibes still finds the data.
Frankly I have no idea how to solve that kind of problem. Does anyone have an idea, please, cause I'm running out of patience, and my skills are quite limited here? Is there anyway, as a webmaster, to control what Netvibes show?

Any idea would be welcome. Thanks a lot in advance.

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld corentin.

Whatever software you're using to create the blog is adding unpublished articles to the feed. This is a problem with that software.

You could manually edit the feed and simply erase the unpublished articles. Just make sure you validate the feed afterwards to make sure your edits didn't mess up the feed.

[corentin]

thanks a lot Bill, for welcoming & helping me!

I thought Netvibes was keeping some information in cache (as google only displays the right posts) but I guess that's a problem with wordpress...
How is that possible that wordpress sends informations in its feeds about posts that are no longer online ? (there's even one that was definitely deleted) Can't I force an update of that feed? Thanks a lot in advance !

[bill]

Are the posts in your feed or not? Check the actual feed.

I'm not privy to Netvibes back end, but most aggregator sites update their feeds on a regular schedule. Perhaps deleting the feed and adding it again would do the trick?

[corentin]

Thanks Bill !

Nope, the posts aren't in my feed. Just checked.
I've tried to delete the feed on Netvibes and add it again, without success.
I've checked with google: in fact, google homepage reads it correctly while google reader finds even more posts !
Netvibes support says they're gonna recrawl, but that may take a while... And I still have no guarantee that the feed will be clean.
One hypothesis is that Netvibes & google reader get access to former/deleted posts because I've been adding the feed while being logged into my blog as an admin.
Seems weird, but right now everything seems weird.

[corentin]

Ok, the feed's been recrawled, and now it's fine ! Thanks a lot for your help Bill.

[bill]

Glad that worked out for you.

One hypothesis is that Netvibes & google reader get access to former/deleted posts because I've been adding the feed while being logged into my blog as an admin.

Somehow you published these posts at some point and they were added to the feed. The aggregator sites picked up the posts then. I haven't played with WP for years so I'm not sure about the back-end operation. Most blog software won't add a post to the feed until you publish it live.

[corentin]

Yep, they indeed had been published before, and put offline after. But I wonder why they still were in the RSS 2.0 feed, but not in the others... That's just weird.

[bill]

It would depend on the interval that the aggregator visited your feed and updated their information. Generally if you have more information being updated more frequently you will see the aggregators checking your feed more often. Sometimes you can set the update interval manually.

[corentin]

INteresting! How do I do that, please ? You mean by changing the parameters of my RSS feed ?

[bill]

That's up to the aggregators. Some can be set on their client back end, but that's an individual account setting. As RSS is a PULL technology you're putting the feed up on a server and waiting for the client to access it. You can't control when your client's RSS readers or aggregators will come to check for an update.