Delay in publishing of feed items

Sorry, archetwist, I realized my wording was a little vague after submitting and should have amended that. What I meant to say was, the feed is not actually displaying anything in the RSS reader.

Steps I took were:

1. Activate module & grant permissions
2. Go to a node edit page
3. Enter some text into Message title and Update message fields.
4. Save the node
5. Check RSS reader for output.
6. Go back to node edit and add more updates, saving again.
7. Check RSS reader again.

In case it matters, cron is working correctly (even ran it manually at various points along the way just in case) and the "access node update feeds" user permission is checked for all roles.

Update!

Strangely, I just went back to my reader and for some reason the updates are displaying now. I swear, this was not the case seconds before. I have no idea why it was delayed by nearly eight hours as it was, unless perhaps cron wasn't actually working and I failed to notice.

Edited to add: Not all the updates appeared, after all that. Only the first three made this morning, but not the update I performed about an hour ago.

Regarding my fears about possible cron failures, according to the Drupal logs it has been running all day without problems. I suspect cron may not even be relevant to this issue though.

More test results: Nearly one hour after submitting the fourth node update update entry, it has not appeared in the RSS feed. Half an hour later, I checked the box to delete all updates and saved the node. The first three updates are still visible in the RSS reader, when I would expect to see zero.

Tips about where one might dig in and troubleshoot, etc., would be most appreciated! (The Drupal logs do not appear to record anything relevant). Sorry for the multiple posts and edits.

Edited to add:

Just saw your most recent post. Regarding "Do you get this message: The update message has been published through the node's RSS feed.", yes I did. And when I performed the removal and saved the node, I got Old update messages have been removed from the node's RSS feed..

I will look at the code directly next.

Dumb question: How the heck do I view the feed code? The URL provided (www.example.com/updates/examplenodepath) is recognizable to readers of course, but it is not clear to me how to view the actual contents of the feed.

Oh and you mentioned the reader. I am using both iGoogle widgets and Google Reader (same results). Perhaps the problem is on their end, I don't know, but if it is it's only affecting this one feed as I've been using others off and on all day.

Changing issue title back to what you selected (somehow it got reversed during our overlapping posts or something, but I saw a reference to the change in an email).

Nope, it's definitely not a local cache issue (see above). Tested again and the same three updates appear in the both the iGoogle gadget and Google Reader, while other RSS feeds are still updating OK. I would be happy to install and fire up a reader application if necessary, but I doubt that would reveal anything new.

Thanks for being so responsive.

Gah. Just to recover a little pride, I do know how to view the source of a page. :) Didn't realize that I technically was viewing the actual feed in that sense!

Anyway, now that I am viewing the source, what in particular should I be looking for? The text of the update messages I added before are not displaying in the source. Since I had actually removed those updates and there should be nothing, it sounds like the actual feed is working. I suppose this means Google is just not picking it up for some reason?

Oh and I failed to mention that have been manually clearing out the Drupal cache at various points along the way.

I have just created another update, saved the node, saw the confirmation message about the update, cleared Drupal's cache, ran the RSS feed, viewed source again and the viewed source still does not contain the text of the entry.

Edited to add: Shortly after that, I clicked the refresh button in Google Reader, and everything was fixed. Google Reader is now chief suspect, but it's strange that I don't need to manually refresh any other feeds.

In any case, more RSS reader tests are probably in order at this stage. I will report back again tomorrow.

That is an excellent suggestion. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first time I've dipped my toes into Drupal RSS Land. That will be my first test tomorrow. Thanks again.

After running more tests today, I haven't been able to repeat the problem under Google Reader. The standard iGoogle Gadget offered up by Google as a choice when adding the feed (not sure what the official name is) is very out of date, however. I seem to recall the issue not really happening in Google Reader at all yesterday, now that I think about it again, and I believe I was only testing under iGoogle. (I really should have tested in a more organized fashion before posting!).

I'll keep an eye on it and test more over the course of the day. I have googled and found a few complaints out there about iGoogle's default RSS Reader, but the best suggestion I could find was clearing local cache and cookies which is not changing anything in this case.

Anyway, I doubt this is related to your module now, so you can probably close this issue. Thanks again!

Shoot, even though my tests were consistently positive for a while this morning using Google Reader, I'm starting to see mixed results again.

After I posted #15 above I continued testing, and it appears that whether I clear site and local caches or not (or whether or not I run cron, just in case), sometimes a new entry will not appear in both Google Reader and FeedDemon. It seems that usually a new update will appear, but sometimes it just won't for a long while.

I also noticed that sometimes when I delete Node Update entries via the check box, they will sometimes be deleted from a displayed feed in FeedDemon, but sometimes they will continue to appear. And when I create a new update, the new update might appear but a deletion made prior to that still does not take.

Couple of peripheral (or possibly relevant) observations:

Firstly, the iGoogle RSS gadget should NOT be relied upon; the entries reflected there seemed to have become frozen at some point yesterday even when I was seeing feed entries appear and disappear elsewhere as expected. So I don't trust that tool and am no longer testing there.

Secondly, I have come to learn that no matter what a web site admin might do, Google Reader never deletes anything from cache for a given RSS subscription. Once a feed is created, entries will live forever under Google Reader no matter what. Until, perhaps, the page associated with the feed is decommissioned and removed from Google's index via Google Webmaster Tools. This is something any developer working with RSS syndications should keep in mind right from the start.

Hopefully this is clear. Let me know if you have questions.

Oh, nearly forgot. In #12 you mentioned troubleshooting "standard" Drupal feeds. Where would you recommend I start? I'm not seeing a core module for syndication, nor any settings on any of the admin pages (only aggregation) so I'm a little confused about that. Thanks once again.

I set aside a big block of time and tested more extensively, and have found that this module is behaving itself just fine. Occasionally feeds will be delayed but that is likely due to page caching on my site, and the delays are not very long. So unless there is another intermittent issue of some kind that didn't resurface during my most recent testing, I'm content. Please feel free to close out the issue.

Also, both Google Reader and iGoogle RSS are terrible test clients. Fat clients are the only way to go in my opinion, until things get off the ground.

Oh and thank you for the RSS tip. It took me longer than it should have to realize that you have to promote a node to the front page before basic Drupal RSS will function at all. Prior to promoting, RSS urls such as what you pasted in #17 were timing out. (Front page is mostly static here at the moment, so there had been no need for that promotion).

Thanks once again, archetwist!