Oops! Blog go BOOM!
As folks know, I like to share mistakes because, I hope (pray) that I'm not the only one who makes them. I also figure if it "saves" someone from repeating it, then I've helped someone else.
So - if you subscribe to my RSS feed, this morning you may have noticed that I had a few new entires. Over 700. What did I do wrong?
I was reading Pete Freitag's entry this morning about how Google now accepts other formats for sitemaps, including RSS 2. So I whipped up a quick modification to the RSS system for BlogCFC. By default, the generateRSS method puts a limit on how many entries are returned. That limit is 15. For the site map, however, I needed to generate a list of all the entries.
So, I simply commented out the upper limit, created a new RSS file. I felt like I had covered all my bases. The generation was slow, but I cached the results so it should load up faster when refreshed. I tested it - and it worked.
All of a sudden someone on IRC let me know that my RSS feed was showing a lot of new entries. Turns out - my code that restricted the total number of RSS entries, also happened to set a default. Without a default, my main RSS feed was now showing all of the entries. This had a lovely effect on my CPU usage as well.
So, for those on my RSS feed, sorry!
Comments
It sounds like your generating the sitemap statically after you post each entry then right? The way I have done it, is just create a dynamic sitemap, Google will only hit it once a day.
Ray: I doubt you caused problems for much of anyone. Now, if you had fiddled with your permalinks *and* dumped 700 entries into the feed... *that* might have been a touch annoying. :D


It might make more sense to just include a file in your blog CFC dist that generates a google sitemap using their schema. That way you can also add category pages, and other pages that might not show up in your RSS feed.
Just a thought.