Another weekend, another NewsGator news item of fun. This morning the NewsGator servers decided to replace the content of feed items with the item’s link. It’s more than a bit annoying and reminds us how updates from the cloud can go wrong and you are trusting your content will be delivered by the proxy in a timely and accurate manner.
Did the proxy parse the feed correctly? Does the central database have the latest items available for its subscribers? Did it change the content in any way? Did the client software change its refresh rate to lower the burden on its centralized servers?
If you use a centralized update service such as NewsGator I recommend disconnecting from the central grid at least once a week to see what feed items you might be missing. You might want to check the publisher’s website or try different feed readers for the feeds where the timely delivery of feed items is important to you.
Be sure to add NewsGator’s ping endpoint to your list up updates with each new post for better reliability in NewsGator, FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire.
Yes, I realize this post might be viewed as anti-competitive given that I work on Microsoft’s online feed platform but when I sit down on a Sunday morning to read the news from my favorite bloggers I expect the system to just work. For the last two Sundays the cloud has failed me.