Does anyone else have a problem with the Tidbits RSS feed not updating? I use Vienna, and on all installs of it (different hardware, different OS versions, different vienna versions) it doesn’t update the tidbits feed. This only started happening in early July–until then there were no problems. If I delete the feed and add it again, it gets the last thirty articles up to date, but then never shows new articles.
I downloaded a random free RSS reader from MAS (LuckNews), and it does exactly the same thing. On the other hand, lire on the iPhone seems ok. Unfortunately, lire is iOS only.
As far as I can tell, tidbits is the only feed that does this. I have a few other feeds that don’t work well, but deleting/re-adding those feeds don’t help them.
I’m open to replacing Vienna with a different reader if that would cure it, but the reader must be stand alone and have genuine, not token, font size control for lists, summaries and articles.
FWIW, I use Feed Wrangler and the Unread iOS client, and the TidBITS RSS feed is working just fine. I’m also a member, which I think gives me a different feed from non-members, if that’s relevant.
My feed reader isn’t showing the two stories posted today, the last item in the feed is the story from the 13th. I’m not subscribed to TidBITS Talk feeds anymore so I don’t know how they’re doing.
Edit: ~11 hours later, the two articles are in my feed, I can’t say when they appeared.
I’ve seen this with Vienna too, and I don’t understand it. The feed absolutely is updating, as you can see if you load it in Chrome (which shows you the code). Try it with https://tidbits.com/feed/
And if you remove and re-add the feed in Vienna, it picks it up fine.
These are largely generic WordPress feeds, but if anyone can tell what might be wrong, we’ll be happy to fix it.
I do see some complaints from the W3C feed validator that I’ll pass on to @elivz
Adam Engst wrote: “I’ve seen this with Vienna too, and I don’t understand it.”
I did find it odd that all 4 of my Viennas failed at the same time. IIRC the last post any of them got normally was “Velop Provides First-Rate but Expensive Wi-Fi Mesh Networking” on 9 July. All somewhat different versions on both Sierra and El Cap, so it wouldn’t be a new bug in a Vienna update (I don’t often update it). V certainly has plenty of random and sometimes intermittent quirks, though.
Is there a CDN between the actual server and clients? If some clients connect to a particular CDN node that cached the feed file longer than it should, that might explain the problem especially since it apparently didn’t affect everyone.