Comments on: NewsGator feed retrieval intervals

By: Selva

Selva — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:58:37 +0000

Thanks Greg for the clarification

By: gregr

gregr — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:40:45 +0000

@Selva - NGES feeds are all treated equally; there is no algorithm in place there to auto-adjust retrieval intervals. A system admin can specify the global retrieval interval, though, and NGES also has a standard XML-RPC ping endpoint at /ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx.

By: Selva

Selva — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:28:24 +0000

How about the internal feeds stored in Newsgator Enterprise server? Do they have catogarization too? Is there any option in Admin to specify this or the time period to poll?

By: Geoff

Geoff — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:04:25 +0000

I’ve just found this post linked from the NewsGator forum, because I had a single feed that refused to update in NetNewsWire. The problem turned out to be that the server had, on roughly June 13th, returned an authorisation error (even though the feed doesn’t require authorisation). No updates had been received since then, suggesting that there’s a class of errors that will cause a feed to not be updated for much longer than 24 hours, or perhaps no longer updated at all.

It would be enormously helpful if the error status of a synchronised feed on the NewsGator server could be propagated to the NetNewsWire client, so the user knows that they may need to force a refresh to get new entries. I only became aware of the problem at all because someone else subscribed to the same feed (through Google Reader) asked whether I’d seen the latest post… which of course led to the question: “Why aren’t you using Google Reader?” I like NetNewsWire, but I don’t like missing out on news and having no visibility of the reason.

By: Symphonious » More On NewsGator Syncing

Symphonious » More On NewsGator Syncing — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:02:23 +0000

[...] NewsGator Syncing that I thought were worth following up on. Firstly, Greg Reinacker points to the article I had in mind about how NewsGator polls the feeds, and Andy pointed me to this forum posting about it which shows how to see why feeds aren’t [...]

By: TPN :: The Global Geek Podcast » Blog Archive » FeedDemon now Working; What About Your Feeds that are Not Updating as they Should

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:42:54 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: tbelcher

tbelcher — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:43:12 +0000

Mate, this is just bloody stupid! I’ve just wasted the morning trying to figure out why a couple of my feeds refuse to update. Couldn’t FeedDemon at least show some status icon on feeds that are causing it grief?

Also the evidence is that your system puts some feeds in the too-hard basket for a lot longer than 24 hours.

I have 2 feeds that have not been updated for the better part of a week. I look in the raw XML and see that the feed data is correct - the XML contains the latest entries. But your program refuses to show them. That’s just plain !@#$%%^-ing mad.

By: Sebastian Lewis

Sebastian Lewis — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:08:09 +0000

Jo, that’s the thing though, if the feed just keeps 404ing then Newsgator would just be wasting bandwidth by continuing to let that feed 404 every time they do a refresh. It’s just easier to put it on a 24 hour interval until it returns so that they don’t hammer their servers with needless 404s.

Sebastian

By: Jo

Jo — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:04:59 +0000

You’re effectively penalizing your users for something beyond their control, which just seems insanely stupid to me. A single 404 kills and updates for 24 hours? That’s crazy. Four hours for a 500? I could see that being acceptable after MULTIPLE 404s or 500, but not after just one.

By: DDA

DDA — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:24:36 +0000

“We get a fair number of inquiries in the forums and elsewhere about feeds not updating; in nearly all of those instances, everything is actually working fine - the feed has usually fallen into category E for whatever reason.”

Then things are *not* working fine; the user is confused or upset about something and the explanation is about how your system has decided their feed doesn’t get refreshed.

I like the idea of syncing all my readers so I’m not reading the same stuff over and over. But I have important feeds that I want updated and being told, “Well, our system decided your feed had some issue so it won’t be refreshed when you want it to be” doesn’t cut it. So I turn off syncing since I can’t find a way to exclude one feed in NNW; while I can easily set a custom refresh interval, it is in *hours* but I’ve set the default feed refresh to be 30 minutes.