The setup
When a new article is written, wordpress will update the blog RSS and this feed always contains the latest contents of your blog. For this blog, that’s davidtan.org/feeds.
Some people uses feedburner to publish and track where their feeds are viewed, clicked and consumed. Plus, there’s also a setting in feedburner that will sync new posts to your twitter account as well (ex. @davidtanth). You can also subscribe to your blog’s feed in Google Reader to keep track of your own blogs.
Thus, the conventional setup/workflow would be as such:
Blog RSS -> Feedburner -> Twitter
Blog RSS -> Feedburner -> Google Reader
However…
Add in a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache and that flow changes a little.
Blog RSS -> W3TC -> Feedburner -> Twitter
Blog RSS -> W3TC -> Feedburner -> Google Reader
Now, W3TC is a brilliant plugin. But the problem is it caches your feed too. And as a result, feedburner will always be looking at a cached copy of your blog’s feed even if you have posted something new at your blog.
The solution
To disable the feed cache in W3 Total Cache, you can use the following steps:
1. Login to WordPress Dashboard. Click the “Performance” option on the left in the WordPress bar.
2. From the W3 Total Cache options page, click the “Page Cache” link.
3. In the “General” section, uncheck the “Cache feeds: site, categories, tags, comments” checkbox.
4. Click the “Save all settings” button.
How To Test That It Works
1. Write a new post and publish it. Go to your feedburner link (ex. feeds.feedburner.com/davidtan) and find your latest post.
2. Add your feedburner feed in Google Reader, you should find the latest posts in the reading list.
3. If you’ve added twitter in feedburner and tell it to sync latest posts to your twitter account, you should see a new tweet in your timeline.
Ending
Guess why I’m writing this post? To share and to test what I preached above works.
Update
Perfect, it works!
Chamisa Trail says
A agree with you, W3 Total Cache is a great WordPress plugin, and it’s free! The creator, w3edge (Townes) is all over the web extolling the virtues of the plugin. But, I don’t recommend that anyone pay for premium support, at this time. There’s a lot to suggest that the W3 Total Cache plugin isn’t being updated. Some embedded features have a mind of their own, such as CDN support. I tried to reach out to w3edge in order to gain some understanding of how my own WordPress site started communicating with a (possibly) trojan infected server in the Netherlands tied to the Alkamai CDN provider, but got NO response. Note: I never had CDN support enabled at the site. I’ve learned a lot since then, including some big mistakes I’ve made of my own. I’m now taking a different approach with the W3 Total Cache plugin, since I still wish to use it. There are only 2 other options (at the time of this posting) – WP Super Cache and WP Rocket Cache.
I’m following your feedburner (disable) instructions above. The issue it fixes is unrelated to my own purposes (gutting CDN support of any kind in the W3 Total Cache plugin). I will let you know.