Notification when fetching failed

Can we have some sort of notification in our RSS Feed, when fetching of a site fails, like in the following one?

http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/extract.php?url=www.probahn.at%2Findex.asp&item=.ms&item_title=b

The parameters itself are correct. Fetching from another site works, but not from yours. Could it be, that your sever’s IP was blocked? If yes, then I can’t imagine why, since I’m checking this site max. hourly per day.

“Failed” also appears, when looking at the Facebook example from your site:

http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/index.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpages%2FNoam-Chomsky%2F294468630182%3F_fb_noscript%3D1&item=.userContentWrapper&item_desc=.userContent&item_url=a._5pcq&item_title=0&strip=._43f9,.text_exposed_hide&action=Preview#results

Cheers!

Hi there, thanks for the report, and sorry about the issues. The server Feed Creator was running on had an older version of the PECL HTTP extension which caused a lot of issues. We’ve now updated it so these issues should be resolved (the URLs you posted now work). If you still have trouble, please let us know.

As for failure notifications in the feed, that’s a tricky issue. Sometimes feeds fails temporarily - could be a temporary issue with our server, or the remote server. It’s not easy to know when the failure is significant, eg. if it’s failing because the remote site has decided to block us. On top of that there’s the issue that the parameters supplied no longer match the correct content elements when the feed was first created, and return unwanted elements. That’s a harder problem to address.

But for basic feed failure monitoring, it would be nice if there was a feed monitoring service, something like https://healthchecks.io that could be used to monitor RSS feeds and after a set number of failures, you’d be notified. It might be possible to do it with healthchecks.io already, but I think we’d have to return better HTTP error status codes for it to work.

Keyvan, the idea with healthchecks.io sounds interesting!

I am already looking forward to have this feature soon in your awesome Feed Creator!

Kudos to you!

dmt

Hi there!

Many of feeds are getting updated sporadicly for a few days. That problem occured back in march. Could it be the server again as stated in the message from Keyvan from March 30th?

here one of my feed : http://createfeed.fivefilters.org/extract.php?url=www.beaucemedia.ca%2Factualites.html&in_id_or_class=&url_contains=%2Factualites%2F

When I test the feed : http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcreatefeed.fivefilters.org%2Fextract.php%3Furl%3Dwww.beaucemedia.ca%2Factualites.html%26in_id_or_class%3D%26url_contains%3D%2Factualites%2F

Error message is : Failed to fetch…

Thanks!

Daniel