Obscure Fix: Blogger / Blogspot Posts Not Showing Up In Google Reader (or other RSS Readers)

The problem: You have a blog at Blogger (or Blogspot), and all of a sudden, new posts aren't showing up in your favourite RSS reader (like Google Reader). A few older posts may show up, but no new posts. New posts still show up on your main blog page, but your RSS feed remains stagnant.

Robyn's blog fell victim to this problem this month, and there were very few useful resources to fix it. Google's help forums are completely useless on this front because most of the search results redirect to the main Google Group for Blogger.

The check - this step will determine if my solution will fix your problem:
1. Go to http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds when you're logged into a Google session with your Blogger/Blogspot account.
2. You should see the name of your Blogger or Blogspot blog under "Feed Title" - click it.
3. If you see a message anywhere that says "Error: Your feed filesize is larger than 576K", this solution can fix your feed.

What's broken:
Something is making your RSS feed WAY too big. What we found with Robyn's blog was that she was copying and pasting PNG images directly into the rich text editor from Windows instead of using Blogger's image upload tool. For some reason, these images were being encoded as raw data in her RSS feed, which takes up thousands of times more memory space than a hyperlink to an image on a Blogger server.

The Fix, Option 1:
1. Go through all of your recent posts with images.
2. Right-click on the image(s), save it to your computer.
3. Edit each blog post you downloaded an image from. Delete the image from the post. Re-insert the image using Blogger's image upload tool, NOT by copying and pasting it from Windows.
4. Save your posts and check your RSS feed - chances are it will suddenly start working.

The Fix, Option 2:
1. Go here: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds
2. You should see your blog title, click on it.
3. Click "edit feed details" just below your blog name
4. Replace everything in the "Original Feed" field with http://yourBLOGnameHERE.blogger.com/feeds/posts/default?maxresults=10 (if you're on blogspot, substitute "blogspot" for "blogger")
5. "Save Feed Details"
6. Check your RSS feed. If it isn't fixed, change the 10 in the above URL to a 5. This number tells Feedburner to grab fewer posts at once.

The Fix, Option 3:
Something is still making your blog feed WAY too big. You probably have accidentally encoded a huge file into your feed. Go back through all of your recent posts and remove any large embedded files. Tip: Start at the first post AFTER the last post in your RSS feed (does that make sense?).

Hope this helps, friendly internet strangers! Leave me a comment if it did :-)

(one helpful source was located here)