FeedDemon now Working; What to do About Your Feeds Not Updating as they Should
I generally don’t give up totally on a problem and the issue with FeedDemon not updating as our feed does was one that had me beat. But as I said; not one to accept that I was still exploring the issue and decided to contact Nick Bradbury who got the feed working and told me what to do if it happens again. This involves a new featured added to NewsGator online.
Our feed is valid and working on all other services that we know of. The feed was working fine before the TPN servers started playing up. Enter non responsive servers last month. This coupled by the fact that the servers went down totally and NewsGator was getting no response from our servers.
Turns out that if a feed is not updated or has a fatal error and does not respond multiple times then NewsGator temporarily blacklists the server and or feed. I can understand that, it saves resources. But on the other hand it stays this way until a manual ping is done. Better would be that NewsGator set up some kind of scheduled periodical ping to see if the server is active again and if so reestablish regular indexing of the feed.
So the process for “forcing” NewsGator to recheck a previously “blacklisted” feed. Especially useful if you have feeds that don’t appear to be updating as they should (Matt):
- Log into NewsGator Online you have an account automatically if you use FeedDemon
- Go to settings on the top right
- Select the “My Feeds” tab
- Find the feed that is the problem
- Manually ping the feed to force NewsGator servers to check the feed
The ping button is a little obscure in that it looks like a “refresh” symbol, it is on the far right. But it is the manual ping button. Hit that and if the feed is valid and updating it should fix the problem. It only took about 30 minutes and I was receiving the latest posts from the GGP blog, including the latest podcast.
Just note though that this only works with feeds that are valid and working. There is no point pinging a server for a feed that is borked. I think that is obvious but worth mentioning.
I am very pleased that our recommended feedreader is now updating our own site. Please let me know if you are using FeedDemon and it is working again for you as well.
Recommended reading is an article about what NewsGator does by the CTO of NewsGator Greg Reinacker. The article is well worth the read. For publishers check out NewsGators ping endpoint details.
Many thanks to Nick Bradbury for his assistance in sorting this problem and letting us know about the new ping functionality. Nice work on FeedDemon Nick, it is still our recommended feedreader and one tool I could not live without. Thanks.
June 8th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Thanks to Dave, Nick Bradbury and the power of Twitter!
June 8th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Good work Dave – it’s actually working now. I didn’t need to ping via News Gator.
FeedDemon has been reprieved – just have to mark read all the feeds.
Matt
June 8th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
@Matt yeah I was not sure if individual users had to ping the server as well – I thought not as I am getting the feed. But left it open in case they had to – thanks for answering this one for me
Glad to hear that your happy. BTW try this with those other feeds that you said were not updating – turns out I had a few feeds in the same boat. I am going to periodically log into NG and check and ping any that have borked.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I’ll keep a check with both FD and GR for a while and see how it goes