RSS feed issues
Some people have reported having issues with the Bad Machinery RSS feed. There are actually two feeds – one that this site auto-generates (badmachinery.com/feed/), and one that I have updated manually with whatever comic I am working on since about 2010 (badmachinery.com/index.xml), which most people are subscribed to. About a week ago (June 28) the manual feed it stopped updating in Feedly and some other RSS readers, and I’m not 100% sure why. It still works in others.
I am looking into it but if you have any idea what might have happened, let me know in the comments below. These things often rectify themselves – if you’re subscribed to the manual feed and this post is at the top of your feed, that’s what happened.
On Inoreader, using badmachinery.com/index.xml, I did not get updates for July 1, 3, or 5. But I did get an update for this post.
I just tried subscribing to badmachinery.com/feed/, and it pulled up old entries but none for July 1, 3, or 5, *or* (yet) for this post.
Wait, there it is. Both feeds have the same thing, missing the three July strips but having this post.
What news reader are you using?
Inoreader
(https://inoreader.com)
I tried Thunderbird on the same computer, Manual Feed has everything. Auto feed has no old posts, just this post.
Ugh, thanks. I have a blog I manually do the RSS feed for the same way. I guess I’ll be updating that…
Ah, *that’s* what happened. I just switched to the auto feed to see if that behaves better.
Having moved blogs across platforms a good few times I’ve hit this myself. The best fix is to do a redirect from the old feed to the new one, but how you do this depends on how your stuff is set up. The most effective is probably a line in your .htaccess file, if you have an .htaccess file. Something like:
Redirect 301 “/index.xml” “https://badmachinery.com/feed”
should push everyone on the manual feed over to the auto feed. If that’s how htaccess is set up on your server.
Good luck!
Pete, I had been redirecting precisely as you say for months when the most recent three comic posts stopped showing. I then rebuilt the manual feed and turned off the redirect, and they still didn’t show. Then I added this news post to the manual feed, this shows, and the three comics from last week still won’t. Even when it was a redirect, the auto feed showed everything and redirected feed was missing those three. Baffling.
I’d add that /feed is cached, which might be mucking things up:
–2024-07-22 16:20:27– https://badmachinery.com/feed/
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2024 16:20:27 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:01:00 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=86400
Expires: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 16:20:27 GMT
I use Desktop Ticker, and reporting that I didn’t have problems with the RSS Manual Feed. Hope this is helpful (either for you, or anyone else wanting to try other Feed Readers). Thanks for letting us know.
I use Thunderbird and have not missed any updates from badmachinery.com/index.xml.
The Old Reader is disavowing any knowledge of the past few entries, for both the manual and auto feeds, even though I can see them in the raw data. It’s also got a several-years-long memory of the feed contents, despite the feed itself only having the few most recent entries.
I suspect you’ve had feed problems (or one of your site rebuilds has renumbered the ids) in the past that created bogus entries with incorrect guid or links in the feed readers with long memories… and the most recent posts have collided with them and been dropped as duplicates. That’s why this post made it through, as it’s got a wildly different post id to the last few strips so it’s not being interfered with.
If I had a “pro” subscription to Inoreader I could try the “Remove duplicate articles from this feed” switch. I don’t so I can’t.
Wrote my own feed generator for my site. Works by reading what I want the feed to say from a text file with the same name as the Markdown file that is my post and updating the XML for the feed.
I got the latest comic and this notice just now, but nothing about the previous two or three comics. I’m using a thing called The Old Reader.
The automatic feed link works. The XML looks reasonable, at least to seems correct. Ran both links through an on-line feed validator. Manual had nothing flagged, automatic got marked as valid and only flagged something you probably can’t do anything about:
“This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.
line 33, column 0: Use of unknown namespace: com-wordpress:feed-additions:1 (11 occurrences) [help]”
I’m assuming once you post a new version of the feed you check it with some variety of feed reader of your own? After that, I’m out of ideas.
One minor note: if you are using https://badmachinery.com/index.xml your reader might not do the right thing because the self-reference doesn’t match the document url (http instead of https). Otherwise, the rss for index.xml is valid per the W3 Feed Validator site.
Still, I see no reason to have a manually updated rss file. Just use the auto one. (My reader must have auto-scanned and found the index.xml link; now using both for sanity checking).
Other odd note: The validator gives a warning for the /feed/ link:
Use of unknown namespace: com-wordpress:feed-additions:1
which I find odd since my wordpress site passes.
Side note: I found out about this post via your (auto?) Mastodon post.
(It seems we have a lot of the same plugins.)
Apparently, the “com-wordpress:feed-additions” thing is cause by the “enhanced distribution” feature in Jetpack and turning that off removes that.
(I dumped Jetpack a while ago when they were making noises about possible AI scraping and most of the social media posting stopped working and they limited the number of free posts.)
The old RSS feed URL has thousands of subscribers. If I dump it there will be a material cost in terms of casual readers. It has been an htaccess redirect from the automatic feed for a while, I switched it back when I was made aware of the problems in order to diagnose the issue.
I will try tweaking the Jetpack settings, Jetpack was the only thing I could think of that might be interfering.
Wasn’t suggesting you drop the old RSS feed. Just that people use the default site feed (/feed/).
*wonders if the RSS readers when given the base URL look for index.xml before looking in /feed/…
I just tried it and it came up with the /feed/ version. Go figure.
Hmm, I’m using Feeder and getting this issue for both feeds (was only subscribed to the auto one before).
I use Feeder too and can’t replicate it. Oh dear oh dear.
I’m subscribed to both feeds via miniflux (https://miniflux.app/), but when you say “most people” are subscribed to the manual feed, I’d caution that anyone using feed auto-detection (as in, they just toss badmachinery.com into a feed reader) are probably getting the auto-generated one.
I’ve seen both feeds flap (swap between working and not working) on and off ever since the Conan comic got pulled and some of the reorganization stuff started, I just presumed it was all related to that.
Next time I see an error, I’ll see if I can figure it out and drop it off here for your perusal.
Newsblur also had missed updates on the feed.
I see “website” is set to http://scarygoround.com instead of badmachinery.com, though? Maybe that’s part of the issue
This message is definitely appearing in both, which is good, right?
As someone who religiously follows the Ramcrete Instagram page I am warming to Glom and his ways. https://www.instagram.com/ramcrete_uk/
I think you and Glenn would get along.
Normally when I click on a link to an xml file it opens in browser. When I click on badmachinery.com/index.xml (or the redirect to /feed/) my browser tries to download it. You know how the save dialogue autofills in the name of whatever you’re downloading? Not this time, it tries to save as a string of randomly generated characters with no file extension. I do not know if this is relevant but it strikes me as odd.
I use Feedly. I just added badmachinery.com/feed/ and it updated. It has not been updating with just badmachinery.com. The new update included a July 5 entry of seven comics, going back to June 21.