Why do some feeds have incorrect relative links?

question
#1

Is it just me or are relative links broken in the web interface?

I’m seeing a few feeds where the links point to a 404 under newsblur.com/something rather than the specific site.

I can find an exact example if needed, but was there any changes in this area recently?

1 Like
#2

Nothing recently, so I’d love to see some examples. Ideally in the form of their /site/<feed_id> url.

#3

I’ll try and find one. I hit 3 earlier today, but I assumed I’d be able to find it quickly when I needed. Seems not. I’ll see what I can find. Thanks.

#4

And these are new issues that only recently changed? I updated the feed fetchers a few days ago to use a slightly updated version of feedparser, so it’s possible but not likely that did anything.

#5

I’ve been seeing this in the feed https://newsblur.com/site/33523/twenty-sided from address http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?feed=rss2

Most recent example seems to be in what is currently the second-newest item, with title “Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: Derision Edition” - the first paragraph has a relative link right away (which I notice only has a query string):

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>On the podcast <a href="?p=53206">yesterday</a>,

This link gets resolved to https://newsblur.com/site/33523/twenty-sided?p=53206 when I view the post in Newsblur.

I don’t recall how long I’ve been seeing this but I think it’s been longer than a few days. I don’t think it always happened, but it’s also possible that the blog in question didn’t always use relative links.

#6

Another example. Feed https://www.newsblur.com/site/7369348/the-motte from address https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte.rss

Second-newest item as of this writing, with title “Quality Contributions Report for November 2021 (1/2)”, has a lot of relative links. The seem to all start with a slash and when viewed in Newsblur get resolved relative to the newsblur.com domain instead of the reddit.com domain. For example, <a href="/r/TheMotte"> results in a link to https://www.newsblur.com/r/TheMotte.

Also, I didn’t mention this before, but in both of my examples, I’m using the website in a desktop browser, not a mobile app.

#7

Durman writes: “I don’t recall how long I’ve been seeing this but I think it’s been longer than a few days.” Yeah. It’s been like this as long as I can remember.

#8

I sometimes got this issue with GitHub wiki rss feed.
I think it is because it contains .. in the url link.

It will redirect to newsblur.com/<content_after_..>

#9

I have it on my private GitHub atom feed (https://github.com/github-username.private.atom) for links in the content. The links are valid plain relative links starting with /, e.g. /Homebrew/brew, but link to https://newsblur.com/Homebrew/brew in the Newsblur UI.

#10

This site gave me a great view of what’s happening. Looks like there is a bug and I can fix it quite easily, but the problem is that it will almost certainly have unintended consequences and I don’t want to launch that the week of Thanksgiving. I’m also finished with five months of paternity leave during the first week of December.

I’ll try to get to this then, and if you want to bump this on Tuesday, December 7th, I’ll be sure to get to it as the change isn’t hard, I just need to be able to watch how things shake out.

2 Likes
#11

Thanks so much to everyone that got to reproducing it before I did, I got slammed and didn’t have time to dummy up some feeds.

I’ll set a reminder on this thread (yay Discourse), absolutely no rush at all.

Thanks!

#12

Ok, I made the change and deployed it just now. It may be retroactive, so give it a few hours and it should start working on those sites.

2 Likes
#13

Looks fixed to me! Today my first example feed (https://newsblur.com/site/33523/twenty-sided) put out another item with a similar relative link and it got handled correctly. Thanks for the fix, @samuelclay! :slight_smile:

#14

Thank you for fixing this! It was only affecting one of my feeds, but I thought it was a problem with their feed. It’s been occurring for months, haha

#16

I forgot to get back to this one, but it seems to be working (or at least, I haven’t spotted any relative links that fail in a few months).

Thanks!

#17

Sorry to possibly necro this thread; I’ve been seeing this for a long time on Newsblur. Most recently with the following feeds:
NewsBlur / https - christine dot website slash blog.rss
NewsBlur / https - www dot jeffgeerling dot com slash blog.xml

In the case of Jeff Geerling’s blog, the first embedded image always loads, but then all subsequent embedded images fail to load, and all links to his other blog posts are relative, and fail to work.
In the case of Xe’s blog, images appear to be fine, but links to xe’s other blog posts are relative and do not work when viewed in Newsblur.

(feed links have been mangled because I am a new user and can only post two links)

#18

These images are broken only on the Text view and not the Feed view, right? The Text view uses Postlight’s Mercury Parser, and it seems to be having an issue on the relative images. Normally they are taken care of correctly, but in this case something is broken.

It’s upstream of NewsBlur and honestly, if you want to get this fixed, post the URL to the broken story (not from NewsBlur but from the original site) to the Mercury Parser github:

#19

Thanks Samuel - I’ll report the posts to that github repo. I am indeed using the Text view. Is this also the cause of the broken links?

#20

Yep, undoubtedly the same issue.