JSON feed without home_page_url silently fails

problem
#1

Per the JSON feed spec, the only required fields at the top level are version and title. I’ve finally figured out why some of my feeds fail on Newsblur- they don’t have a home_page_url, and Newsblur will silently fail rather than showing the feed title and the items.

Here are some near-minimum test cases.

‘with url’
https://dyn.tedder.me/rss/with-url.json
http://www.newsblur.com/site/7707761/test-with-a-homepage-url

‘without url’, shows [untitled] for the feed title.
https://dyn.tedder.me/rss/without-url.json
http://www.newsblur.com/site/7707762/untitled

Without going through the rest of the code, I assume it fails because of None here, rather than a valid string. I’m still trying to test what is required for the items array but I’ll have to wait more hours before I can get it to refresh.

#2

You have got some epic timing. I just came back from a week long vacation and have the newsblur code up.

Just fixed it and deployed the fix. Hit insta-fetch or wait for it to come in, it should work now. Thanks for writing this up!

#3

oh nice! I was creating some new feeds and finally dug into what was causing it.

#4

Further testing, look at the feed examples again. I tried adding to items an item that doesn’t have a date_published, and I believe that causes an error, Not an RSS feed (553).

#5

noting for myself (since I end up googling and finding this occasionally), a null id in an item will give a 553 too. Maybe also url but I haven’t tested that.