I have enough feeds now, in NetNewsWire, that I didn’t notice when a couple of them went silent.
Some bloggers just stop posting…ahem, not like anybody here. So when I scanned the lists of feeds, day after day, a few quiet ones seemed normal to me.
But upon going through the feeds manually, I discovered that their Web sites still had lots of new posts, but I wasn’t getting them. In each case, this was due to the feed URL having been changed.
If I recall correctly, there are ways of specifying redirects to new feeds. I don’t know if any of these sites actually did that. Certainly the last posts that I did receive from them didn’t mention it, so maybe it was due to some adjustment in the blog service they were using that even the authors didn’t know about?
I do know NetNewsWire doesn’t seem to have UI to show me that sort of information, if it’s returned at the HTTP level. It has a “dinosaurs” page, but that just tracks the last time it thinks people posted, not if it got an error message from the server. Or, more accurately, I did see error messages from some servers in the Errors window, but that seemed to be for more usual kinds of errors – server isn’t currently responding, etc.
Hm, looks like one of the bloggers might have manually changed her feed due to problems. That would explain it.
The manual run-through works for now, since I have less than 100 feeds, but what if I get to 500? 1000? I would hate to lose posts from weblogs I find interesting, though I suppose if I get over 1000 feeds, I won’t have time to read them all, anyway.
Weaponized Fluff 