From time to time feeds stop working. Because I spend all of my newsblur time in the “unread” mode, I almost never realize when such malfunctions occur because I don’t see the exclamation marks that are visible only in “all” mode (or in the “fix this malfunctioning feed” menu, which also isn’t visible in “unread” mode). Sometimes weeks go by before I realize, via omission, that something’s wrong with a feed. By then I’ve unwittingly lost a lot of activity from the malfunctioning feed.
So here’s an idea: provide an option to log site-fetch failures to a user-specific/private built-in rss feed. By piping feed/fetch errors into an rss feed that appears alongside all of our other subscriptions, failures will appear naturally in the newsblur workflow. Upon seeing entries in the “errors” feed, we can then fix feed issues before losing weeks or months of updates.
Not only might this be good for users, it might spare newsblur’s servers from weeks or months of useless retries against malfunctioning sites that users aren’t aware of.