4 ms·

The Many Broken Feeds

37 points by zdw 1y ago

BoredPositron 1y ago
For me the biggest problem is sites that truncate their feeds. As an example the "the verge" feeds are basically useless now.
- LorenDB 1y ago
  I don't mind truncated feeds too much, as long as there is an explicit notice at the end that the full content is available on the website.
- crtasm 1y ago
  Try a feed reader that can download the source article for you (similar to reader mode in web browsers)
- jerlam 1y ago
  The Verge is heavily paywalled now. They won't put their full articles in the feeds, since they want you to pay.
lapcat 1y ago
> There is also an option to put your website behind a CDN front, such as Cloudflare or Github Pages, and let the CDN provider deal with renewals. The biggest cause of broken feeds for me is actually Cloudflare challenges on the feed URL.
- simonw 1y ago
  I've seen those in the past for RSS feeds from Substack - https://simonw.substack.com/feed https://simonw.substack.com/feed for example - which is frustrating because the whole point of an RSS feed is to support polling by automated systems!
- 8organicbits 1y ago
  Yes, I came here to say that. My RSS reader runs as a daily GitHub action, which looks enough like a bot to get blocked. https://github.com/robalexdev/Feeds https://github.com/robalexdev/Feeds
- liqilin1567 1y ago
  [dead]
alastairr 1y ago
I collect a lot of feeds, I see each of these a lot. It'd be great if there was a service to politely notify the site owner, as I'm sure many don't realize their feed is broken / incorrect / missing.
- abhin4v 1y ago
  That's a great idea! Maybe one of the feed aggregating search engines can do this. Feeds often come with publisher emails so it should be possible to automate.
Avamander 1y ago
How do people discover new feeds? Are there any nice collections of blogs or are people just accumulating them over the years based on HN posts?
- ferociouskite56 1y ago
  Google News Alerts
- simonw 1y ago
  If a website looks like a blog there's a high chance it has a feed and is probably using HTML metadata to advertise it, like this: <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="/atom/everything/"> Most feed readers know how to read that, so you can paste the URL of the blog itself into e.g. NetNewsWire and it will locate that rel="alternate" link and subscribe that way.
  - Avamander 1y ago
    Yeah, but this doesn't solve the question of actually finding relevant blogs with feeds in the first place.
    - simonw 1y ago
      Follow links to articles on blogs from places like Hacker News. If you like what the author is saying, subscribe - then watch out for other blogs they reference in their future writing. Try to find link blogs, since those are more likely to help you discover other things to read.
- mike-cardwell 1y ago
  I view the webpage source and search for the strings "rss", "atom" and "feed" until I find one. I currently have 145 feeds. I follow blogs, news, I get updates about local events, I follow youtube channels, I get notified about new releases from various github repos, follow updates on various status pages, follow various subreddits etc.
- 1y ago
miladyincontrol 1y ago
> There is also an option to put your website behind a CDN front, such as Cloudflare or Github Pages, and let the CDN provider deal with renewals. Or they could just use a modern webserver setup? Manually updating certs on webservers in 2025 is just a massive waste of time. Also of the opinion many a personal site being dynamic is less than ideal. How many outdated php sites I've seen hijacked, ruined when their hosting service updates things behind their back, run into resource related issues, caching bodges that go wrong, etc. Meanwhile the site maybe gets updates like once a week. At the very least the RSS feed certainly shouldnt need to be generated on every request unless theres good reason. Well aware my complaints yelling at the void as many just want a prebuilt solution which 'just works', even if it requires a LAMP stack.
Eric_WVGG 1y ago
I ran an RSS aggregator ~15 years ago. All these things were still problems back then… also FeedBurner was a complete plague, at least that’s mostly gone away. I’ve been trying to work out a new approach to newsreaders for a couple years now, and have all but given up on RSS. The standard needs to improve in significant ways — most notably with discoverability — if it ever wants to get back to the Google Reader “glory days”. I’ve tried reporting bugs to rags like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, each one is a a black hole. Unless you can make a case for helping monetization, they don’t care at all, and I can’t say I blame them.

37 points by zdw 1y ago

For me the biggest problem is sites that truncate their feeds. As an example the "the verge" feeds are basically useless now.

LorenDB 1y ago
I don't mind truncated feeds too much, as long as there is an explicit notice at the end that the full content is available on the website.
crtasm 1y ago
Try a feed reader that can download the source article for you (similar to reader mode in web browsers)
jerlam 1y ago
The Verge is heavily paywalled now. They won't put their full articles in the feeds, since they want you to pay.

lapcat 1y ago

> There is also an option to put your website behind a CDN front, such as Cloudflare or Github Pages, and let the CDN provider deal with renewals. The biggest cause of broken feeds for me is actually Cloudflare challenges on the feed URL.

simonw 1y ago
I've seen those in the past for RSS feeds from Substack - https://simonw.substack.com/feed https://simonw.substack.com/feed for example - which is frustrating because the whole point of an RSS feed is to support polling by automated systems!
8organicbits 1y ago
Yes, I came here to say that. My RSS reader runs as a daily GitHub action, which looks enough like a bot to get blocked. https://github.com/robalexdev/Feeds https://github.com/robalexdev/Feeds
liqilin1567 1y ago
[dead]

alastairr 1y ago

I collect a lot of feeds, I see each of these a lot. It'd be great if there was a service to politely notify the site owner, as I'm sure many don't realize their feed is broken / incorrect / missing.

abhin4v 1y ago
That's a great idea! Maybe one of the feed aggregating search engines can do this. Feeds often come with publisher emails so it should be possible to automate.

Avamander 1y ago

How do people discover new feeds? Are there any nice collections of blogs or are people just accumulating them over the years based on HN posts?

ferociouskite56 1y ago
Google News Alerts
simonw 1y ago
If a website looks like a blog there's a high chance it has a feed and is probably using HTML metadata to advertise it, like this: <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="/atom/everything/"> Most feed readers know how to read that, so you can paste the URL of the blog itself into e.g. NetNewsWire and it will locate that rel="alternate" link and subscribe that way.
- Avamander 1y ago
  Yeah, but this doesn't solve the question of actually finding relevant blogs with feeds in the first place.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Follow links to articles on blogs from places like Hacker News. If you like what the author is saying, subscribe - then watch out for other blogs they reference in their future writing. Try to find link blogs, since those are more likely to help you discover other things to read.
mike-cardwell 1y ago
I view the webpage source and search for the strings "rss", "atom" and "feed" until I find one. I currently have 145 feeds. I follow blogs, news, I get updates about local events, I follow youtube channels, I get notified about new releases from various github repos, follow updates on various status pages, follow various subreddits etc.
1y ago

miladyincontrol 1y ago

> There is also an option to put your website behind a CDN front, such as Cloudflare or Github Pages, and let the CDN provider deal with renewals. Or they could just use a modern webserver setup? Manually updating certs on webservers in 2025 is just a massive waste of time. Also of the opinion many a personal site being dynamic is less than ideal. How many outdated php sites I've seen hijacked, ruined when their hosting service updates things behind their back, run into resource related issues, caching bodges that go wrong, etc. Meanwhile the site maybe gets updates like once a week. At the very least the RSS feed certainly shouldnt need to be generated on every request unless theres good reason. Well aware my complaints yelling at the void as many just want a prebuilt solution which 'just works', even if it requires a LAMP stack.

Eric_WVGG 1y ago

I ran an RSS aggregator ~15 years ago. All these things were still problems back then… also FeedBurner was a complete plague, at least that’s mostly gone away. I’ve been trying to work out a new approach to newsreaders for a couple years now, and have all but given up on RSS. The standard needs to improve in significant ways — most notably with discoverability — if it ever wants to get back to the Google Reader “glory days”. I’ve tried reporting bugs to rags like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, each one is a a black hole. Unless you can make a case for helping monetization, they don’t care at all, and I can’t say I blame them.