Newcomer's rant: Partial import, broken RSS

problem
#1

I joined Newsblur today - and not everything went smoothly :slight_smile:

  1. not all of my hundreds rss imported from GReader to newsblur… I’d need to follow it manually and add them later… (I have premium account. so that’s not the point here)
  2. some quite popular RSS are constantly broken, for example: http://www.cringely.com/feed/, http://parisbymouth.com/feed/, http://aerostat.rpod.ru/rss.xml (I can continue, there’s dozen)
4 Likes
#2

I, Cringely doesn’t validate: http://validator.w3.org/appc/check.cg…

Paris by Mouth looks OK: http://www.newsblur.com/site/1493476/…

Aerostat doesn’t validate: http://validator.w3.org/appc/check.cg….

So Paris by Mouth should work, but the other two are issues on the publisher’s side that NewsBlur can’t automatically fix. Send more!

#3

Well, maybe they don’t validate, and maybe they’re wrong about it - but Google Reader works with these feeds perfectly fine, still… And for me as a user it means that I can use Google Reader for that, and I can’t use Newsblur. See my point?.. :slight_smile:

#4

Samuel, you presume it’s our problem. It isn’t. You provide a service that people can’t use - who needs an RSS reader that doesn’t do real-world RSS?! Google Reader is perfectly fine with all those (yes, probably malformed) feeds, NewsBlur isn’t. Which will people use? If you don’t care, what’s the point of providing such a service??

#5

I seem to have trouble adding http://news.ycombinator.com/ or http://news.ycombinator.com/rss . It shows a red exclamation point. Option 1,2 or 3 don’t seem to help. Yet it shows that over 2,400 people are subscribed to it.

Feed seems valid @ http://validator.w3.org/appc/check.cg…

#6

So is there any news ?

I switched from Greader. I use newsblur since some weeks. I tried many but newsblur looked the best solution. However I discovered that I have some broken flux. ( ex http://fulltextrssfeed.com/www.lesnum… or twitter flux )

I don’t understand the answer of the employee Samuel Clay, and agree with Bogorad. Google Reader is fine with those flux !

And anyway, feeds valid or not, even for valid flux you say:
“Paris by Mouth should work”

Should ?!
U cannot take 5 seconds of ur time to test and see it actually does not ?

And still you ask " Send more! ". You’ve got a cheek.
Why send more? Already the given ones (VALID or not) you couldn’t give a damn.

#7

I made some pretty sweeping changes last week and not only should those feeds now work, but repairing them works a whole lot better. You can now see why a feed has failed to fetch.

#8

I’m also going back and rereading this thread and noticed that folks are discontent about NewsBlur’s handling of some malformed yet legit feeds. I would love to fix them, and it seems upgrading the feedparser that I use does the trick (and then breaks dozens of other feeds). I’ll try that again, but I could also look into cleaning the feed more aggressively if I detect the presence of what looks like stories. It’s quite a bit of work, but I’ll start with these two feeds and see where I can go.

#9

Good news! The fixes I made last week fixed both of those feeds. They work great!

1 Like
#10

I confirm it solved broken subscriptions.Thank you Samuel Clay !

The ones from twitter are still broken but I’m gonna ignore and remove them from my list and I will follow them in my twitter client. It’s more coherent and I want to stay with NewsBlur ! It’s definitely a good rss client.

Have a nice day.

#11

Twitter disabled RSS a little while ago, so no twitter rss feeds work. There is a workaround, but it’s intentionally a pain in the butt, so you’ll have to manually change your feeds to the new url format.