I had an issue with one of my source feeds this morning,with bad character data in one of the items. I fixed it in the source feed, but my feed digest feed still shows the original bad item. I waited a while to see if it refreshed itself but it hasn't yet - perhaps since it has the same set of guids it isn't refreshing the contents? So can I make it refresh manually?
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Feed Informer Support
Is there a way to resync/refresh a feed?
13 posts-
Posted 17 years ago #
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I can either wipe the posts and immediately recrawl it for you, or you can change the guid (if possible). If you want me to refresh from new, I need to know what feed it is. The URL of the feed copied and pasted here would be okay (or e-mail me if you prefer).
Posted 17 years ago # -
I've got two feeds with this source
http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/YH9GY54EIC.rss
http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/FMY1LDF52G.rssI tried deleting and re-adding the source feed, but it still kept picking up the bad item with the guid. Since this was in my forum and it was my own post, I deleted it and reposted it to get a new guid. My feeds are still showing an item with the old guid even though I deleted and readded the source feed - so is something still cached?
If you can wipe and recrawl these two feeds I would appreciate it. In the future would it be possible to add this feature to the control panel? (ie add "wipe/refresh this feed" as an option for each feed). I also use FeedBurner and their Feed Medic allows a "resync" option - I assume this is a similar function and its very handy for recovering from something bad in a source feed. thanks
Posted 17 years ago # -
I finally figured out I should check the "show only live items" box, and that cleared out my deleted forum post, but now for some reason that problem with double CDATA from this post is showing up again....
http://www.feeddigest.com/forums/topic.php?id=31&page&replies=5
did something regress?
Posted 17 years ago # -
Shouldn't have. I'll need some URLs so I can see what you're looking at.
Posted 17 years ago # -
Sorry about that - same one as last time
Posted 17 years ago # -
OK, after some sleep I think I figured out what's different. I have 2 versions of the source feed that's giving my digest trouble with the CDATA structures. One is the raw feed from my forum, and one is a version that goes through FeedBurner.
http://www.aplaceofgrace.org/smf/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/aPlaceOfGraceCommunityForumYesterday when I was trying things I had changed the source feed from the raw feed to the FeedBurner feed. There is a slight enough difference in the feeds that I think the FeedBurner feed made it through your digest changes with CDATA handling. You can see the difference by looking at the "new member Sunday" item.
I've changed the source Feed in my digest back to the raw feed, and its now validating. So you can check the 2 feeds if it helps you improve your feed parsing.
Anyway - do you think the "feature request" of allowing user-initiated refresh/recrawls is reasonable?
Thanks
Posted 17 years ago # -
Okay, I see. So http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/FMY1LDF52G.rss is now correct, and it's using the aplaceofgrace.org feed. Whereas if you use the FeedBurner feed, you still get bad stuff coming through?
I believe this MAY be because while I wiped your entries for the first feed, I did not wipe them for the second.. and perhaps you already had the FeedBurner feed already in our system before I did that? In any case, if you want me to, I will wipe and reload the FeedBurner feed, let me know.
Regarding allowing user-initiated recrawls, it's not a BAD idea, but it has pitfalls. One is that it would only be allowable on feeds that are only being used by one user. Consider if many people are using the same feed (as is the case for most of our sources) and some are using it in archive mode, some aren't, etc.. then if you wipe and recrawl it, the archive is lost and only live items are recrawled.
Posted 17 years ago # -
In interests of thoroughness, I replaced the raw feed with the FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/aPlaceOfGraceCommunityForum), and I'm back to not validating. I did notice some subtle differences in the feeds (the FeedBurner feed has an apostrophe character, and the raw feed has the numeric code, for example)
Perhaps its just an issue of needing to be recrawled. If you wouldn't mind one more time to check. I wanted to leave this here for you in this state in case there's an extra condition that would help improve your parser.
I can see your point about recrawling. I'm not sure if I that's what I need - what I'm in need of is like the Resync feature of FeedBurner.
http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?p=2492
Especially the part about recovering from bad chars in a feed - I had an item that had bad characters, I fixed it, but FeedDigest had it cached and wouldn't reread that one item. I guess that's the one situation I'd like to be able to recover from. In this case it was my own forum post and I could delete and repost, but I couldn't do that for all posts.
Thanks
Posted 17 years ago # -
Just to elaborate.. FeedBurner can do resync because they store data individually for each burned feed, rather than each source feed. This is because FeedBurner users generally burn their own feeds (rather than other people's) so there's little duplication. With Feed Digest, however, it makes no sense to store feed data separately for each digest that uses a feed because of the massive duplication.. since most people are digesting feeds that are not their own (for example, we have hundreds of users who all use one BBC News feed.. having that data duplicated would be a big problem for us :)). That's why if we did a recrawl feature, it'd only be for feeds with a single user, so as to avoid any potential clashes between users' intentions.
But yes, it needs to be recrawled in this case I think, thanks for giving me the go ahead, I'll sort that out now.
Posted 17 years ago # -
That feed should now have been recrawled. Feel free to give another try.
Posted 17 years ago # -
Ah, OK that makes sense. These are my feeds that I'm merging as a service to users of our church's web site through FeedBurner email, so I wasn't thinking of scenarios with lots of users. I guess I can cross my fingers and hope I don't need a resync/recrawl very often.
And my feed validates again - thanks.
Posted 17 years ago # -
I imagine most of your feeds will only have you as a subscriber, so if that feature gets added.. you should be cool :)
Posted 17 years ago #
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