Major FeedDemon Problems
Tuesday, June 03 2008
Today I realized I don’t know of the hundreds of feeds I am subscribed to in FeedDemon which ones are updating and which ones are not. I’m currently running the latest version if FeedDemon: 2.7.0.0. The IE Team made a blog post this morning about IE8 Beta 2 hitting this summer. I never knew they made this blog post. I caught it via Techmeme. I went to FeedDemon and despite the post being made hours ago… the new post has not yet come in to FeedDemon.
As you can see – the recent post showing up for the IE Blog is the one from 5/22. Not the one from today.
Now if you look at the xml that is the RSS feed for the IE Blog you will see that today’s blog post about IE8 Beta 2 is in fact part of the RSS feed (which I’m supposedly subscribed to via FeedDemon).
And to top it off: when I view the RSS feed in IE7 and IE8 today’s post appears as well.
So what’s the deal here? Why is it that the RSS for the IE Blog is updated with the latest posting from today yet FeedDemon has yet to pick up the new post? The xml for the IE Blog’s RSS doesn’t look broken.
Having so many feeds I am subscribed to and not knowing which feeds are failing to update like this is really frustrating. FeedDemon offers no good way at troubleshooting issues like this. I’ve gone into the IE Blog’s feed properties in FeedDemon and “validated” the feed which does give me some highlighted issues with the IE Blog’s RSS. You can see what it gave me here. It actually highlights a giant part of today’s post with issues. Is this why FeedDemon is not picking up today’s blog post from the IE Team? How the hell should I know? I’m a user who is no RSS master. The validation also picked up issues with posts prior to today which FeedDemon did bring in just fine.
I’ve also tested the IE Blog’s RSS feed in RSS Bandit and it works just fine including today’s most recent post.
I’m seriously considering moving away from FeedDemon. I use it mainly because of the sync capabilities of syncing what I have read/unread on one PC to the web that is then synced to other PCs as well. This is wonderful but what’s the point of enjoying this if I don’t know which feeds are even being updated?
If anyone has any ideas as to what might be causing this issue please let me know.
Tags: rss, feeds, rss-bandit, feeddemon, newsgator, troubleshooting, issues, xml, meh
7 comment(s) so far
I've ditched FeedDemon currently. I'm back to using Windows Live Mail. It doesn't do sync with other PCs or a web service but I need something reliable and easy and its the easist solution for me right now.
I can't afford to have a RSS reader suddenly NOT updating RSS feeds. I imported my FeedDemon feed to RSS Bandit and discovered there were quite a few feeds that weren't being updated and have not been updated in weeks.
Looks like it's Newsgator not FeedDemon having issues. Non synced feeds aren't having issues: forum.newsgator.com/.../Topic40247-14-1
Thanks Aaron. Wow that's not a real good situation there for users and these feeds.
Apologies for not posting here sooner, Brandon! My understanding is that MSDN is incorrectly blocking us (NewsGator) because they've determined that too many requests are coming from us. The problem, though, is that they're not differentiating between multiple requests for the same feed and requests for different feeds - in other words, we're retrieving dozens of individual feeds from MSDN at an acceptable interval, and they're incorrectly interpreting that to mean that we're hitting their site too often.
We've seen this problem before with some other sites (most notably Slashdot) and are working with Microsoft to get it resolved. In the meantime, as Aaron suggested, you can get the feeds working again by un-synching the folder they're in.
BTW, we've added an entry to our support blog about this issue: blogs.newsgator.com/.../msdn-feeds-fail
Nick I appreciate you taking the time to let me know what's up with the MSDN feeds and have subscribed to the support blog for NewsGator. Its unfortunate MSDN seems to have gotten confused in regards to incorrect intepreting the requests from NewsGator.
Where can I expect to see information on the resolution of this issue? Will the NewsGator support blog be updated when the issue is resolved?
Trackbacks
FeedDemon still having problems?
Posted on 7-09-2008 at 11:01 AM
A few weeks ago I posted about my displeasure in discovering that all my http://blogs.msdn.com feeds suddenly stopped working. I highlighted the fact that for weeks I had not known these feeds weren’t updated and was pretty frustrated with FeedDemon simply
Hmm. I'm having the same problem except it's only with the IE blog. I'm only subscribed to 16 RSS Feeds so it's easy to follow. Everyone else's are showing up right away, except the IE Blog's. Very strange indeed.