Feedburner doesn’t have a clear way to delete items from your feed – here’s a short guide that will walk you through it.

The Story

I was working on a post a few days back when I accidentally hit the ‘Publish’ button. The post (which was only a small way towards being finished) was automatically added to my blog index and my blog’s feed. Feedburner, being the antsy antelope that it is, added it to my Feedburner feed only minutes after. I quickly removed the new post, but it still appeared in my Feedburner feed.

Feedburner caches feeds so that it doesn’t have to download them every time someone accesses them. Once the cache was updated to include my fraction of a post that I had published, it stayed there even after I removed the post from my blog’s feed by making it a draft again.

I figured out a way to delete items from a Feedburner feed. It’s actually pretty simple. Here goes nothing.

Deleting an Item From Your Feed

Follow these steps to delete an item from your feed:

1. Remove the item from your blog’s feed. When dealing with Wordpress, there’s two ways of doing this. You can either set the item to be a draft again, or delete it. If you aren’t dealing with WordPress, this is a fairly simple task so you can probably figure it out for yourself. ;) In general, if the post does not appear on your blog’s index, it probably isn’t in your feed.
2. “Nuke” your feed in Feedburner. You can do this by heading over to Feedburner and then clicking on the ‘Troubleshootize’ tab. Scroll down until you see the header ‘The Nuclear Option: “Resyncing” your feed’ and click the button to ‘Resync Now’. It’s kind of odd to find this option here, so that’s why I’m making a blog post about it. It was the last place that I decided to look. The option is also hidden under the page fold so it’s harder to find.

It’s as simple as that. The resync option is played up to be a catastrophic event (”nuking” your feed), but it’s painless. Your feed will be rebuilt from your updated blog feed that does not include the extra post instantly.

Questions? Having trouble? Leave a comment!

Tags: Delete Feedburner Feed Items, Feedburner