Maybe we could use this thread to list out all the feeds that NewsBlur is having problems parsing and displaying properly. Sometimes the feed is just badly generated, but sometimes it looks fine, and I don’t know why NewsBlur chokes on it.
Here’s my list so far:
http://shermanslagoon.com/comics/rss
All the feeds on http://www.todayonline.com/rss-feeds
Another one. It’s a comics feed. Sporadically, the wrong comic image is shown. Instead of the comic for the day, the previous day’s comic is shown. I checked the feed and the image urls are correct.
And another one from Google News. Links on some posts do not display correctly, seems to only affect posts with many articles.
Need to add
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrossedCo…
2 new posts in the last 2 weeks, but NewsBlur tells me “no new posts”, even after insta-fetch.
I don’t know if it’s mainly comics feeds or not, but those are the ones where it’s most noticeable because everything is dated. You might not notice if something from say, Ars Technica didn’t show up, but you’ll probably notice if it skips a comic on you.
http://retailcomic.com/comics/feed is not updating anymore.
Looks like we have a comicfeed problem.
Hmm, you’re right. Hopefully fixing the comics feeds will also fix all other feeds.
http://www.techmeme.com/feed.xml
content pane shows the content of some other feed. Fortunately the link to the original works…
http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/i…
Several of the links displayed by newsblur for hacker news daily have the main site’s URL inserted before the actual link, e.g.
http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily//…
…instead of
Most of the blogs from bicycling.com:
http://bicycling.com/blogs/fitchick/f…
http://bicycling.com/blogs/hardlyseri…
http://bicycling.com/blogs/kingme/feed/
Weirdly this one works: http://bicycling.com/blogs/boulderrep…
This one doesn’t report as misbehaving today, but doesn’t show any stories and was showing as misbehaving yesterday: http://www.brickhouseracing.com/?feed…
The feed for Rational Optimist (http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog-…) has not been working for ages, though the site otherwise appears fine. I recall it working fine as a google reader feed.
I havent’ responded in this thread yet, but if you have broken feeds I suggest you right click on them and open Statistics. Check the error and see what’s wrong. Otherwise, I’ll get to specific sites in a week or two when I’m done with the more pressing issues.
Take your time. I agree that this is not anywhere close to a significant issue.
For ‘Rational Optimist’, it’s consistently been the same error for weeks - ‘Timeout (505)’. However, if I go to the feed directly in chrome or IE, after a long pause, it all comes through, albeit as a wall of text. I suspect the issue is that the site decided some time ago to introduce a longer delay before it responded to rss requests and the problem is simply that Newsblur doesn’t give the site long enough to respond before it gives up.
Duane, I haven’t seen sites that do that. What’s happening is that my Python parser is much more through than your browser’s parser. So while you see titles, content, author, and maybe tags or enclosures, I’m parsing for much more than that, and when a feed has more than a hundred stories it takes a long time. The timeout is for 20 seconds, and the average feed parses in 0.9s (when it has new stories. feeds that don’t have new stories take waaay less time).
Today I logged in to NewsBlur and discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that my feeds from http://www.todayonline.com/rss-feeds have been fixed and are now working fine for the first time. Thanks Samuel!
These other feeds I complained about are also working fine, as of now:
http://shermanslagoon.com/comics/rss http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrossedCo…
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run…
Google News feeds are rendered better now, but still not perfectly.
Also a small clarification about the feeds I’ve listed: These feeds are the ones that NewsBlur is able to ingest (Feed Fetch returns an OK(200)) but is unable to display without errors. I would also view the actual feed, in XML, to make sure that it is correctly formed and formatted. I think that doing these things will help Samuel to find and fix the issues more easily.
It’s Friday night, so I’m not going to remember to check these, but run them through the RSS validator. That’s often a good way to find issues. A 200 OK just means I can get to the feed, it still may not be valid.
This is my Google News “Top Stories” feed:
http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=a…
W3C says it is valid RSS
Google News aggregates similar news stories into single posts with links to the related articles. Newsblur seems to take these posts and split them up into their component links. This means I have to read nearly the same story 8 times, and my unread counts are exponentially larger for that feed than the same feed is with Feedly (or was with Google Reader)