Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate
http://www.aldaily.com/feed/
The right-click statistics says 906 subscribers and last update 1 hr ago, also says: This site has published zero stories in the past month or has averaged less than a single story a month.
> I know that’s not true, A&L Daily publishes 3 articles per day like clockwork.
Hi, while my original post focused on Statistics, that may have been a red herring (sorry). The deeper problem is that Newsblur only shows 2 A&L Daily stories, one in 2010 and one in 2013, while I know for a fact that there are 3 stories published daily. The Statistics dialog still says (as before) “Why so infrequently?This site has published zero stories in the past month or has averaged less than a single story a month. As soon as it starts publishing at least once a month, it will automatically fetch more frequently.”
Assuming that Newsblur is indeed attempting to fetch data from A&L frequently, for example as the dialog says, “1 hour ago,” then the operation is not returning the expected results. Best, KRA
Yeah, something’s wrong with their feed, in that all of the story’s are publishing the same ID, so they get smooshed together.
Yet somehow Google Reader had this working just fine, or at least used to. Any word on workarounds?
Why am I able to get the A&L Daily feed for Feedly and ReadKit, but not for NewsBlur? Two things bother me: 1) I want to see the daily updates to A&L Daily and 2) I’m actually paying for NewsBlur. Something seems wrong with this picture.
Yep, they are publishing an invalid feed: http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cg…
I bet competitors constantly merge stories or have a massive number of duplicates.
“I bet competitors constantly merge stories or have a massive number of duplicates.”
I’m not sure why, but I don’t see duplicates in their feed, let alone a massive number of them.
I checked and you’re right, they don’t have that issue. But NewsBlur is pretty strict about these feeds. The stories are all saying that they are the same story, so only a single story gets to win. On the other hand, for some sites you don’t see dupes on NewsBlur you definitely will on other services.
Really, the Arts & Letters folks should just use a GUID on a per-item basis and they would have a working feed. I’ll try emailing them.
Emailed the editor:
Hey AL Editor, I run NewsBlur, a news reader.
Arts & Letters Daily has around 900 subscribers on NewsBlur, but because your RSS feed is invalid, nobody can read anything you publish on your RSS feed.
All you would need to do is add a GUID tag to each item in your RSS feed. All it does is permalink to the story. Simple!
See how your feed doesn’t validate: http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cg…
See this support thread for exasperation from my users: https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/…
I would love to get this working. Just forward this email on to your tech staff and I’m certain they could have it fixed before supper tonight.
Sam
Let’s hope the A&L folks respond to positively. Thanks very much for making the effort to get this fixed.
My previous solution appears to be broken, but this will work: https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.p…