Some RSS feeds not showing

  • Resolved Brandon402

    (@brandon402)


    5 years, 11 months ago

    I have a news aggregator site that uses several RSS feeds. I did have 24 feeds going, but something happened a few days ago, and now only 10 feeds work.

    I get this error message: “A feed could not be found at this URL, A feed with an invalid mime type may fall victim to this error, or SimplePie was unable to auto-discover it… Use force_feed() if you are certain this URL is a real feed.”

    I have tried a few times going through every line of PHP files, but I could not find anything for RSS and I’m not sure how to apply the force_feed?

    If you know what’s wrong or how to apply the force_feed, that would be a huge help.

    Thanks,
    Brandon

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    Any change, update, modification, etc. before this happened?

    I usually try the actual feed in my browser to see if it works.

    You can further run it through the feed validator but keep in mind not all faults that show in the validator will break a feed.

    If you find a broken feed you might visit the parent website to see if they moved the feed or changed things around.

    There are a few feed sanitizers around or you can build your own using Heiko Behren’s Feed Sanitizer. https://github.com/HBehrens/feedsanitizer

    That’s a Python script… no, it’s not a WordPress plugin.

    Thread Starter Brandon402

    (@brandon402)

    @t-p Yes I installed a few new plugins before this happened. I had since deleted those plugins, but the feeds that quit working stayed that way. I also wasn’t able to restore from a backup. One of the plugins was a caching plugin, I’m guessing that might have been the culprit but I’m not sure.

    @jnashhawkins Thank you, I will give those feed tools a try. It’s really strange that out of 24 RSS feeds, 14 quit working but yet 10 still work. I think it might be something on my site but I will still try things on the non-working feeds.

    Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    This may also be a plugin or theme conflict. Please attempt to disable all plugins, and use one of the default (Twenty*) themes. If the problem goes away, enable them one by one to identify the source of your troubles.

    If you can install plugins, install “Health Check”: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/health-check/ On the troubleshooting tab, you can click the button to disable all plugins and change the theme for you, while you’re still logged in, without affecting normal visitors to your site.

    @brandon402

    It’s really strange that out of 24 RSS feeds, 14 quit working but yet 10 still work.

    Yeah, I agree that’s a higher number than usual but sometimes an odd character or something breaks the RSS feed temporarily while that one item trickles down through the feed list.

    I have logged into a few of my sites and found one or two feeds temporarily broken. I usually pass that troubled feed through a feed sanitizer to fix the issue. Some of my sites pull as many as 100 feeds so it never surprises me to find one not working.

    Thread Starter Brandon402

    (@brandon402)

    @jnashhawkins @t-p

    Well, I tried both suggestions, but I’m still in the same situation as 3 days ago.

    I did the Health Check plugin and enabled plugins one by one. So it must not be the plugins.

    I also checked the RSS feeds and they are valid.

    Do you think it might be your feed importer?

    I still use the old Multi-importer (no longer supported) or else FeedWordPress.

    And I have seen those choke on feeds that pass the validator but might have a slight interoperability issue.

    I can’t remember any of them choking and passing the validator with a clean bill of health except when there might have been an odd character in the post.

    That’s when I’d use the sanitizer on it. There were a few cases where the sanitizer didn’t work either though.

    On an active site, I might have had to wait a week or so… on a slower to update site I sometimes waited months.

    I’ve also had issues where my own sites crossfeed other sites of mine and I had to edit my posts to rid the feed of an odd character or two. Usually in a title. Often a Facebook feed that then cross-posted.

    It’s just one of those things we need to contend with and one of the reasons I often rum two different importers.

    Learning to track down and figure those things out takes time. Validators, Sanitizers, and having a reader built into a web browser helps. After a time you’ll be able to look at a raw feed and spot some problems.

    Thread Starter Brandon402

    (@brandon402)

    @jnashhawkins @t-p

    It turns out it must have been the theme causing the problem. Luckily they made a child theme that looks exactly the same and I was able to use that. Minimalist Blogger was the original theme I used, and Minimal Blog is the new one I’m using.

    What’s weird is the feeds would work fine on the original one but only for say a half hour. I’d come back and only 10 out of 24 feeds would be working. So far so good with the new theme after 2 days.

    I copied all of my website links, code, and things down in notes. So I was able to fairly easily rebuild the site in an hour and I did that about four times ??

    Thanks again guys for trying to help, I thought I would update and let you know I got the issue resolved.

    Brandon

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Brandon402.
    Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    Glad its sorted ??

    I never would have suspected the theme. That was a good catch and thanks for letting us know.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • The topic ‘Some RSS feeds not showing’ is closed to new replies.