Peter Watts' Rifters blog RSS not working

Hey! Just moved over from google reader and transitioning in pretty well, so thanks! Just noticed one of my feeds was flagged as having an error though
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?feed=rss2
loads just fine in my browser, so can you take a look? thanks! I love that author

3 Likes

Right click on the title and open Statistics. That should tell you what’s going on.

2013-04-24 14:50:53
Timeout
(505)

Ah. That’s HTTP Error 505 - HTTP version not supported. Huh. But also the stats show you appear to have successfuly imported from the site as recetly as march. So maybe some recent tweek to the NewsBlur http getter is pissing off his server?

rifters.com appears to be running apache on linux so I’m not sure what’s up. And as I said, I can access it fine in Chrome directly.

Screencaps:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ewyfvsqv7qm…
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q1vifxsmhzm…

ah and thanks for the quick response!

Could it be the size of the feed? Trying to put it into feedburner gives the message: “Your feed filesize is larger than 576K. You need to reduce its size in order for FeedBurner to process it. Tips for controlling feed file size with Blogger can be found in Tech Tips on FeedBurner Forums, our support site.”

Getting the raw feed XML from a browser shows it’s 1,315,116 bytes as of right now. A big portion of that appears to be two base64-encoded JPEGs embedded in the feed “text”.

The offending post is dated March 30th, which is right around when the feed stopped working.

Nice work!

So the question is what to do about this? Google reader could still handle this, so I’m wondering is there a max size specified in newsblur in either how much to accept or in some HTTP header field where it advertises how much it can accept which is less than what there is to give so it gets a 505?

Can that be increased or is that a danger to the rest of the site? It does seem like embeding images in RSS is a weird back practice, but there is is :confused: