Google AJAX Feed API No Longer working -- Cache not refreshing every 60 mins

[Peter T]

For the last 7 years, I've been using Google's AJAX Feed service to post on blogger and then read the feed to my website. Recently, I noticed the Feed Cache for the API has not been pinged or refreshed in almost 4 days now. 

Has anyone else had this problem? Is/has google discontinuing the AJAX Feed service? 

Thank you,

Peter T.

[Jeremy Geerdes]

There has been no announcement of deprecation - much less discontinuation - for the Google Feed API that I've seen. However, it should be noted that the Feed API's TOS explicitly state that the deprecation policy (which says Google will give three years' notice before discontinuing the service) will no longer be applicable from April 20, 2015. (I.e., the service may be discontinued at any time, with or without warning, after that date.)

That said, feeds have always been cached, so there has always been a delay between an update of the live feed and such updates appearing via the Feed API. If you would like to ensure the freshest available content, the quickest and easiest workaround is to add a cache-busting parameter to the end of your feed URL, as in the JS example below:

var url = 'http://www.mysite.com/path/to/my/feed.rss?nocache=' + (new Date).getTime();

This will almost ensure a unique feed url every time you request the feed, and so the API's backend will go crawl the feed as though it was new.

Of course, this could also introduce the possibility - particularly if your server is slow in returning the feed - that the API times out and returns an error about being unable to fetch the feed. So you'll want to make sure you have logic to handle that and send the same request a second time if necessary.

jg

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[Wet Coast Life]

I made a hacked together landing page when iGoogle was retired and been fine up until last week. I am getting the same issue for cached RSS feeds but only for Reddit.com's RSS feed. All other RSS feeds on my landing page are current and use the GoogleAPI feed.

The Reddit RSS feed URL is http://www.reddit.com/.rss and shows current posts.
Using the GoogleAPI feed with the following call, you get the posts from July 30th (today is Aug 7): https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/load?v=1.0&num=5&output=json&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2F.rss

Changing the post count or trying the cache busting parameter options and no luck. Using other RSS feeds from Reddit and get various caching of a couple days to couple weeks but nothing ever current.
As an example, http://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss Feed using the following call returns July 21st posts: https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/feed/load?v=1.0&num=5&output=json&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fall%2F.rss

Is Google blocking the update of caches for Reddit.com RSS feeds?
Is there anyway to force the cache refresh or should i look at excluding the GoogleAPI feed and coding a local caching solution (would like to avoid)?

The landing page i made and to see live example is http://this.4that.net/

Thanks in advance.

Drew

On Wednesday, July 30, 2014 1:33:22 PM UTC-7, jgeerdes [AJAX APIs "Guru"] wrote:

There has been no announcement of deprecation - much less discontinuation - for the Google Feed API that I've seen. However, it should be noted that the Feed API's TOS explicitly state that the deprecation policy (which says Google will give three years' notice before discontinuing the service) will no longer be applicable from April 20, 2015. (I.e., the service may be discontinued at any time, with or without warning, after that date.)

That said, feeds have always been cached, so there has always been a delay between an update of the live feed and such updates appearing via the Feed API. If you would like to ensure the freshest available content, the quickest and easiest workaround is to add a cache-busting parameter to the end of your feed URL, as in the JS example below:

var url = 'http://www.mysite.com/path/to/my/feed.rss?nocache=' + (new Date).getTime();

This will almost ensure a unique feed url every time you request the feed, and so the API's backend will go crawl the feed as though it was new.

Of course, this could also introduce the possibility - particularly if your server is slow in returning the feed - that the API times out and returns an error about being unable to fetch the feed. So you'll want to make sure you have logic to handle that and send the same request a second time if necessary.

jg

On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 3:30 PM, Peter T <ptar...@gmail.com> wrote:

For the last 7 years, I've been using Google's AJAX Feed service to post on blogger and then read the feed to my website. Recently, I noticed the Feed Cache for the API has not been pinged or refreshed in almost 4 days now. 

Has anyone else had this problem? Is/has google discontinuing the AJAX Feed service? 

Thank you,

Peter T.

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[Karissa Demi]

I am also having this issue on at least 3 feeds across various websites I manage. Adding the nocache param did not help and actually stopped rendering the feed entirely. 

Is there any solution to this or an estimated time when it will be fixed?

Thanks.

[Jeremy Geerdes]

I know of no other workaround or solution. And I don't know of a timeline for a fix. However, I will point out that the API's TOS explicitly state that the deprecation policy will no longer be applicable after April 2015. This means that, even if they fix the service now, after that date, Google may discontinue the service, with or without notice, at any time. (The deprecation policy says that they will give 3 years notice unless it is not feasible to do so.) In short, it may be time to start looking for a migration path.

jg

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[Wet Coast Life]

My feeds just started working showing current content. No changes made on my part. You may want to re-check your feeds now and see if they are still having an issue as unsure if this was a per feed fix or global fix.

Getting stale data for 12 days with no way to refresh or fix the underlying cause has given me the push to update the page and remove the API. It was nice and convenient while it lasted and first issue since iGoogle was retired. 

Cheers.