Broken Feeds

The silent breakage of the feeds.

Is your website working?
You can usually tell just by visit it, at least the bits you can see.

But the feed is another story. It's not visible in the website.

What could have prevented this?

Feed readers

Sadly many feed readers don't indicate when a feed is broken.

Feedly is the worst. You can't tell if a feed is broken unless you navigate to Feeds --> Organise Feeds, then change the Activity filter to Unreachable.

At least Inoreader shows a warning triangle in the feed list. But honestly, who's looking at their feed list?. With hundreds of feeds organised in folders, a tiny warning triangle is easy to never get noticed.

I wish feed readers would treat broken feeds as any other news. Make it a post showing up in the feed. Then you can decide, do you want to get notified again in a week if it's still broken, or just mark it as permanently broken.

Visualize on the website

Many blogs show the most recent posts. This is generated at build time or from the blog post database.

But what if it was generated directly from your own feed? Then, a broken feed would be instantly obvious.

Hosting

Some hosts give you access to the access log, a list of all requests served as well as their status. Filtering for HTTP 404 responses can show you feeds that are completely missing. However it won't catch misconfigured or old static feeds that are there but not working as expected.

Not all hosts make the access log available, also it's not easy to parse the log on a regular basis.

Analytic scripts injecting tracking JavaScript will not work for feed URLs.

Monitoring

So what about a monitoring service?

There are services available to monitor broken links. But they would not discover an old missing feed after a redesigned website.

We need a broken feed checker that remembers all seen feed URLs and can warn when they go offline. This service would be very close to the existing feed reader services but changing the focus to blog owners.

Services could include:

• Scanning for all feeds
• Warn when a feed goes missing
• Warn when a feed has not been updated in a year