CL RSS breaks WTF?

January 6, 2006 11:51 AM

What's wrong with (my?) CraigsList RSS feeds?

I want to subscribe to 3 searches on CraigsList using RSS. I have added the subscriptions to bloglines sucessfully and gotten new posts.

But after each time I do it, the feed goes bad (gets the [!] icon and no more posts appear) after 1-5 days. No amount of waiting seems to fix them- I end up deleting and re-adding them every week.

Do you have this problem? Do you know how to fix it?

posted by Four Flavors to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I have this problem with several of my feeds in bloglines, including del.icio.us/popular. I hope you get some good answers here, because it's annoying as hell.
posted by aebaxter at 12:12 PM on January 6, 2006

It's often down to poor sanity checking in the data input which leads to invalid feeds. If ever a feed breaks go to feedvalidator.org, put in the URL of the feed, and see if it's busted or not.
posted by wackybrit at 12:26 PM on January 6, 2006

Another bloglines:delicious affectee here. Del.icio.us had a power outage recently and I date my (7 feeds I think) problems to that time. I asked inthread at their weblog (delish) about any feed problems but noone responded.
posted by peacay at 12:45 PM on January 6, 2006

I use Bloglines too, and am wondering if it could be that Bloglines pings the CraigsList/del.icio.us feeds too often. Could you change that setting in Bloglines?
posted by pithy comment at 12:52 PM on January 6, 2006

RSS was simply unavailable (and then spotty) on delicious for a while, not because of the power failure, but because it wasn't scaling well (IIRC). And then the power outage and the Yahoo! hullabaloo came along in the middle, delaying the fix. I'm not sure whether or not it's back to normal or not now, but I doubt it's the same issue as Craigslist's.
posted by mendel at 1:02 PM on January 6, 2006

I can't adjust the ping interval on BL.

I just checked with a friend and he indicates he has the same problem with CL RSS feeds.
posted by Four Flavors at 1:14 PM on January 6, 2006

I think craigslist has bloglines blocked from polling their RSS feeds.

Also, today I noticed that bloglines had deleted all my craigslist search RSS feeds. I wonder if they're finally talking to each other to resolve this issue?

I've seen it recommended to email [e-mail] to ping them on this issue. Maybe if we all do it someone will fix this?
posted by joshwa at 10:00 AM on December 2, 2006