Yahoo RSS Issue

January 30, 2011 5:26 PM

I use Yahoo for my RSS feeds but for some reason, some sites that are actually being updated are not updating on my page. Any idea why this might be and what I can do about it?

It's not all of my feeds, only some of them. Should I switch to a different reader or is the problem that some sites update but forget to update RSS or something? If I should switch, what do you recommend?

posted by Maias to Education (3 answers total)

Someone in another thread (I can't seem to locate it) said that Google updates its feeds (sends updates to your reader) based on the popularity of the feed itself. Which is dumb to me. Now, you're using Yahoo, but I'm wondering if they do the same thing, or have some weird parameter like this.
posted by cashman at 6:02 PM on January 30, 2011

I use an application-based RSS reader and many feeds inexplicably die off after a while.

It's possible that the site's rss feed has: moved location, a weird revisit policy, blocked the feed with a 'robots.txt' entry, a long 'expires' header set, malformed content, ... etc.

Lots of things could go wrong. I'd check the RSS feed directly and go from there.
posted by o0o0o at 7:06 PM on January 30, 2011

"If I should switch, what do you recommend?"

Google Reader. Yahoo has done away with random free services in the past and are currently trying to spin delicious off on it's own. Google has shut some things down too, but not to my knowledge anything that was wildly popular. Wherever you go, make sure to keep an updated copy of your OPML file.
posted by soelo at 10:42 AM on January 31, 2011