For those folks still facing RSS issues, I’ve escalated this to our wonderful web hosts, Hosting Matters. They’re very responsive, very skilled, and are now helping solve this issue.
I’ve received a number of reports over the past week, but I didn’t respond to many of them. Just making sure that you issue-submitters know were heard, even if I didn’t respond directly. Normally I respond to all issue emails from the contact form, but in this case I had little to offer as I was gathering more information.
Since this issue affects more than one RSS service, I’m pretty sure that the issue isn’t something on our pages that sometimes causes their RSS parsing engine to puke. We’re now looking at HM’s security setup blocking automated requests and so mucking things up. Hopefully that’s it, and this issue will ease away over the next day or so.
Open thread!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
I’ve never even understood what RSS is or how to use it, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
Ryan
Seems to have sorted out for me. I re-added Balloon juice and was fine, but a few days later, suddenly got a flood of past posts from my first BJ account delivered at once. After a few days of duplicates, the duplicates ended and everything seems fine now.
WaterGirl
When I checked last night, rss was still not working, but I can’t get to my computer this morning to check. Oh the joys of a broken ankle!
rikyrah
Hey Alain ??
Alain the site fixer
@rikyrah: Good morning! If I was on my phone or iPad, I’d include some cool emoji, so I’m going old school: :)
Amir Khalid
I don’t see the need for RSS. When I want to know what’s new on a website, I go there and look. If I have time to read the updates RSS tells me about, I certainly have the time to check each site itself for updates. Granted, maybe it’s because I don’t follow that many websites compared to other people, but how many sites do you have to be following before RSS starts saving you time?
Ohio Mom
I’m another one out of the RSS loop (I’m a neophyte old lady increasingly befuddled by technology’s advances).
Just stopped by because I like to remember to thank you Alain every now and again for keeping everything running, and running very smoothly.
different-church-lady
Alain, if you would be so kind as to give me your recommendation for a trustworthy domain name registrar, I would most appreciated it.
Roger Moore
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
RSS is a system that lets you check up on blogs and the like without opening your web browser. The blogs put up a RSS feed, which contains the headlines and usually but not always the post contents but not the comments. Subscribers have a feed reader on their computer that regularly checks with every blog they’re interested in and downloads the feed. The feed is displayed in a nice layered way that makes it easy and fast to check out what’s going on without opening a ton of pages in your browser.
For example, my reader has a list of blogs on the left, each of which has a number indicating how many unread posts there are for that blog. If I click on a blog, the right side turns into a list of recent posts, with unread ones bolded. If I click on a title, I can see the content of that post, which I can then open in my browser if I choose. It’s a great way of keeping up to date with blogs that update irregularly or ones where you aren’t likely to be interested in every post.
Alain the site fixer
@different-church-lady: I’ve become a big believer in Hosting Matters, the folks who host Balloon Juice (and now all my stuff). Cheap domains, automatically private (no extra fees to hide your address and name on the record so you get less junk mail and spam and less folks knowing where you physically are), and no “cheap this year, big price increase next”.
I’ve used Network Solutions, Gandi, GoDaddy, BlueHost, Hosting Matters, and a half dozen others. I like Hosting Matters’ simple, cheap approach. My number 2 recommendation would be BlueHost, but I do have some reservations as they charge to make the record private.
different-church-lady
I was consdiering Hosting Matters to host my new sites as well. How can I be sure (a) I will own the domain and can transfer it to other hosts if desired and (b) the will not hoover up other similar names upon purchase or availability search?
Major Major Major Major
FWIW Alain I haven’t been having trouble.
…that seems rather antithetical to people who use RSS as a notification service!
@Roger Moore: @Amir Khalid: I use it so that I know when to check various sites, and if the new content is something I care about in the short-term or I can catch up on it later.
I have several friends who use RSS to keep their webcomic reading up-to-date and organized.
@different-church-lady: You don’t need to buy a domain through [service X] to host your site with [service X]. I tend to buy domains through Google.
Alain the site fixer
@different-church-lady: They won’t – they have a simple business model. I’d be more suspicious of larger mega corps like the others. You know what, drop me a line using the contact form. Let’s talk privately.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: Is there a reason you prefer Google? I am in the process of building a website right now and will have to soon decide where to buy the domain name from, hence the question.
different-church-lady
@Alain the site fixer: If you say they’re trustworthy I believe you.
And just because I need to vent: Yahoo appears to be on a suicide mission. Their e-mail severs fail more than work now. This is part of my motivation for getting my own domain — Yahoo took over the servers of the non-Yahoo address I’ve had for 25 years, and now I can no longer trust that my mail is going in or out at any given moment. This has been going on for months and I cannot resolve it.
Bruce H
I’m using the Nextcloud News RSS feed aggragater on my own server (Ubuntu 17.10), and I’m not seeing any issues with your RSS feed.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: My question is, if I do choose to get the domain and the hosting at the same time from the same company, how can I be sure the domain is registered to me directly and not the hosting company?
This is why I was thinking of doing it as quarantined steps.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: Good question. I have wondered about that too.
Bruce H
@different-church-lady: I use gandi.net for my domain registration. Currently, I’m self hosting my own (admittedly extremely basic) site on my home connection, using dynamic DNS from afraid.org. For more robust hosting, you might look at hostgator.com or bluehost.com.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
I find there are several use cases for RSS:
1) Sites that update infrequently, even if they’re on a regular schedule. The RSS feed lets me know when there’s new content without me having to go check myself.
2) Sites that update regularly but where I’m only interested in a fraction of the content. It’s much faster to flip through the headlines in RSS than it is to scroll through the whole site in a web browser.
3) A few sites where the headlines are the most interesting part and the articles rarely add much useful. This is good for things like gear sites, where the headline contains most of the message and the article is just a press release on the details.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: @different-church-lady: I’ve never run into a company that owns a domain name you pay to register. I use google because I trust them for such things and I’m used to their toolkit, which is important to me since I change hosts much more frequently than most people (for personal projects).
At work we use google because we use their whole ecosystem to run things.
And google also has gmail you can use on your own domain. Used to be free for a small number of users, not sure that’s still the case.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: Have you ever used SiteGround?
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: I am not familiar with them.
MattF
Not about RSS.
My Q: Is there a way to put italics inside a blockquote? I’ve tried, and the format of the text inside the blockquote gets messed up. It’s readable and the desired italic text is there, but it becomes indented in a peculiar way. A small point, but I’d like to be able to do it.
schrodingers_cat
Woodrow/Asim
Synchronistically, I was just having a convo about RSS as a hard-to-support technology this weekend, and how it’s lack of support aligns with how challenging it is to scale.
I’m glad you guys still actively support it; as @Roger Moore said it has uses as you scale out/up your web presence/reading, esp. if you’re trying to escape the Social Media cave.
Origuy
Does anyone have a suggestion for managing email lists? My club has been using Yahoo Groups for years and has several groups, one for members, one for the directors, etc. I’m wondering how long Yahoo will support groups, plus there have been problems with delivery recently. We need something that would be easy to migrate and easy for recipients to deal with.
Alain the site fixer
@different-church-lady: You own the files, and the domain. When you want, you can move one or both. To be a Domain Registrar, you are like a notary, a private entity doing a registered service with standards and rules.
I used to use two different companies, on purpose, but I’m quite happy with HM. Their email setup is pretty sweet, for example. They’re old-school, so you can, for example, pipe emails that come to a certain address to a program or script you run on the server! Cool stuff, that.
Should any of you need any help, drop me a line, that’s a lot of what I do these days (plus some custom pc support for a couple of small businesses). I’ve moved from many configurations, and so I’ve seen a lot of bumps.
different-church-lady
Thanks for the tips, folks.
Jay S
I mentioned Inoreader in the last post with two feeds found for balloon juice.
The old feed t URL that used to work is https://balloon-juice.com/?feed=rss2 It still has 130 subscribers and has been dead for 2 weeks.
The working feed is https://balloon-juice.com/feed/ and it has 22 subscribers.
You can find the detailed information for Inoreader from the menu “Feed Settings” “View feed information”
I don’t know if this is an issue for other feed readers but you may see if you can find the actual URL that they are using.
Jay S
@Major Major Major Major: The Inoreader support forum indicates that some web hosting blacklists for excessive RSS requests to prevent degradation of service. It could be poorly implemented code on the reader service side. ETA or user setting the polling interval to low if it can be customized, or just hitting refresh repeatedly.
middlelee
I just tried to read comments on Tom Levenson’s recent front page and the background is black with gray text. What?
The Other Chuck
@Amir Khalid:
Podcasts are RSS feeds.