Fallback when Hungryfeed can't get feed

I personally like to see errors when something is going wrong because it’s easier to fix & notice, but maybe it would be a nice feature to allow customization of the error message so it doesn’t show all the technical info to visitor. The only thing is that then you don’t really see what happened which makes debugging more difficult. maybe the error details could go in the page comments or something.

I don’t know if it’s possible to use the cache because that’s all handled internally by the SimplePie library (part of WordPress). HungryFEED doesn’t really deal with the caching.

Yeah, I know what you’re saying, although I guess I feel like if a serious error were occurring, I’d probably notice it on my own if the feed didn’t update itself within a reasonable amount of time.

When I got that error, it actually updated properly as soon as I reloaded it, so I don’t know what happened that one odd time — it probably just couldn’t connect to the server. But in those cases, it would be really nice if it would just fall back on the cached version. Then no one needs to know that an error even happened.

Obviously, you’d want to see what errors are happening if they’re preventing the feed from updating at all, but maybe that could be an optional debugging parameter built into the shortcode, so that you could just toggle it when you need it.

Anyway, sounds like you have very little control over it anyway. It was mostly wishful thinking. Overall, though, thanks for building a great plugin!

Yea unfortunately the WordPress RSS library (SimplePie) handles the cache internally.

Seems like I get this error or a similar one pretty often. I’ve been building this site, and it seems like it’ll pop up at least once a day. When it does, it goes away as soon as I reload, but it’s still super annoying and rather unsightly when it rears its head.

Here’s the website:
https://www.kelapo.com

And here’s a screenshot:
https://gyazo.com/754ff7f751f33970a467935e85770b48.png

I’m using it for the YouTube feed on the left of that, too, but that one doesn’t seem to break as often. I’ve only noticed it once.

I know this doesn’t directly have anything to do with HungryFeed, but do you have ANY suggestions on how I might remedy this? Is there a way I can tell SimplePie to just fallback on the most recent cached version rather than display the error? If it were a serious enough error, I’d notice after it didn’t update for a few days. (Not just the occasional timeout, which I’d honestly rather not know about)

well, hungryfeed wouldn’t be making a curl request if the cache was still available so that’s not really an option. the cache is already expired & deleted. i really couldn’t say for sure why you’re getting so many errors, it could be server load, network congestion, etc.

probably the best I can do is to make the hungryFEED error output configurable so you could make a message that is more friendly

for the custom error code you could put html that would match your site design and not necessarily have any error text visible to the user, perhaps the error details could be in a hidden comment in the page source for troubleshooting purposes

Yeah, it obviously adds an error class or something, so I could just hide it with CSS. Thanks for the suggestion. I’m gonna poke around some SimplePie-related forums to see if anyone has a good solution.

It’s weird because both kelapo.com and coconutoilcooking.com (The blog it’s pulling the feed from) are hosted on a mediatemple (gs) account. ah well.

I just submitted HungryFEED 1.5.1 so that should be available pretty soon. there’s a setting where you can put in your own HTML for the error, so in your case you could just put in a fallback blog post HTML that matches your site design. I’d suggest outputting the error in the comments though just in case you need to troubleshoot like so:

<div>Your Template code Here...</div>
<!-- {{error}} -->

That’s pretty strange that you are getting the error so often. HungryFEED should only be hitting that URL once every hour if you have caching turned on.

oh by the way if you want to simulate an error for design testing, just enter a bad url for the feed