Removing posts from RSS feed

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  christalmond · Member · Feb 5, 2009 at 12:53 am

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  When a post is deleted, it persists in the blog’s feed. I’m subscribing with Google Reader, and assume this is the case with most or all feed readers, as it is wordpress.com generating the feed. Having said that, I am aware of the possibility that google is caching the pages and filling in missing items. I don’t actually know. I’m burning my feed with services from feedburner.google.com

  Anyway, my question is, how can I edit my feed to remove the items I know longer want on the blog and its feed?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  christalmond · Member · Feb 5, 2009 at 1:03 am

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  Er, no, I’m not burning my feed like that. That’s my other blog on a different platform. Of course feedburner can’t be used on wordpress.com because of the prohibition of javascript.

  So my feed is being generated in the usual way. The question’s the same apart from that. Sorry for the absent-mindedness.

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  rmalaspina · Member · Feb 17, 2009 at 4:43 pm

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  I am having the same problem. I’ve deleted the post but it shows up still on the RSS line. How to get rid of it?

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  christalmond · Member · Mar 23, 2009 at 12:47 am

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  Hey Rick. No one came to our aid here, so I thought I’d do a little research of my own. It seems that RSS feed is a record of what has been posted, and there is in fact no way to remove items from it.

  If someone, like me, is occasionally prone to posting when drunk, or in a bad mood, and then afterwards wishing they’d gone for a long walk instead of blogging, the best strategy is to not delete the post, but to replace its content with something else (example: ‘This post has been removed by the author’). This is because feed readers support updating but not deletion. After the RSS feed has been updated, it can be safely deleted from the blog, and the updated content is all that remains in the RSS.

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  tellyworth · Staff · Mar 23, 2009 at 12:52 am

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  If you remove a post it disappears from your RSS feed.

  However, some feed readers – Google Reader in particular – won’t recognize this, and will continue to cache your post forever.

  There is no way we can fix it. It’s a feed reader problem.

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  christalmond · Member · Mar 23, 2009 at 12:58 am

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  Thanks tellyworth. I learned this about Google Reader the hard way!