Re: Is there a domain/URL restriction on the feed API?

[Jeremy Geerdes]

Well, my apologies. I thought I had responded to your previous email, but apparently not.

That said, yes, the Feeds API does support pulling feeds from URLs on subdomains. 

It's tough to say what's going on without being able to see one of your development blogs itself. My guess would be that the development / QA URLs may be inaccessible to the general public (e.g., the servers themselves are behind your firewall, the DNS entries are internal only, etc.). If that's the case, then the crawler which the Feeds API relies on to parse and cache the feed would be unable to access the feed, and the API will never be able to return anything. Of course, that's difficult to prove without a valid link. (I am assuming that the links in your post are placeholder/examples to show the structure rather than actual links. If they are actual links, then this would seem to prove my hypothesis since I can't access them.)

Hope this helps!

jg

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 10:51 AM, Joshua Brown <dreadpir...@gmail.com> wrote:

The sites we build at my company often have blogs, and we sometimes like to show excerpts from the blog feeds on the homepages. In the past I have used jQuery and the Google Feed API with great success to access the blog RSS and display the excerpts. But recently we changed our dev/QA URL schema, and now I can't get the RSS feeds to load on our test sites.

Our dev/QA urls look like this now: sitename.dev.aztekhq.com or sitename.qa.aztekhq.com. The blog feed is always /blog/syndication.axd (we use BlogEngine.NET).

I am using https://github.com/sdepold/jquery-rss for the jQuery plugin to the Google API.

What I have determined through testing so far:

• Loading a feed from a live blog works. Loading from a dev or QA site does not. This has been determined both on sites I am developing and also through the Google Feed API playground, so I know it's not something I did wrong with the script.
• I can access the dev/QA feeds through my browser, and I can also subscribe to them using an RSS reader, so I know the feeds are working.

Is it because of the way our dev/qa URLs are structured? I'm kind of at a loss here. I hope this is clear. If not, I can provide more information

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Jeremy R. Geerdes

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Des Moines, IA

If you're in the Des Moines, IA, area, check out Debra Heights Wesleyan Church!

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[Joshua Brown]

Thanks for replying.

The dev.aztekhq.com URL is a private domain for internal development, but the qa.aztekhq.com URL is for our clients to review their sites before launch.

A feed URL you can actually test is http://sweetbriargolfclubrwd.qa.aztekhq.com/blog/syndication.axd.  I tried testing it using my script and the API playground and I couldn't get anything to load.

On Wednesday, May 14, 2014 11:39:44 AM UTC-4, jgeerdes [AJAX APIs "Guru"] wrote:

Well, my apologies. I thought I had responded to your previous email, but apparently not.

That said, yes, the Feeds API does support pulling feeds from URLs on subdomains. 

It's tough to say what's going on without being able to see one of your development blogs itself. My guess would be that the development / QA URLs may be inaccessible to the general public (e.g., the servers themselves are behind your firewall, the DNS entries are internal only, etc.). If that's the case, then the crawler which the Feeds API relies on to parse and cache the feed would be unable to access the feed, and the API will never be able to return anything. Of course, that's difficult to prove without a valid link. (I am assuming that the links in your post are placeholder/examples to show the structure rather than actual links. If they are actual links, then this would seem to prove my hypothesis since I can't access them.)

Hope this helps!

jg

[Jeremy Geerdes]

Hmm. Well, I am able to access that feed. It does validate according to the W3C validator, but they offer a couple of suggestions. I can imagine that most of them would hurt anything. I wonder, though, about the inclusion of the iframe in the description for the Mother's Day specials item. Is there any way to comment that out, just to see what happens?

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[Jeremy Geerdes]

The fact that the API returns a 400 code indicates (to my uneducated non-Googler brain, anyway) that the parser is choking on the feed. However, there can be no disputing that the error codes and messages in the API could be much more clear. Alas, I doubt it will change. The big G has included an April 2015 sunset date for the Feeds API into its TOS.

[Joshua Brown]

It's not just this feed, it's any feed coming from our QA sites. I just picked this one as an example. I don't think the iframe has anything to do with it. Another feed you can try that I couldn't get to load is http://shurtech.qa.aztekhq.com/blog/syndication.axd.

On Wednesday, May 14, 2014 12:03:58 PM UTC-4, jgeerdes [AJAX APIs "Guru"] wrote:

Hmm. Well, I am able to access that feed. It does validate according to the W3C validator, but they offer a couple of suggestions. I can imagine that most of them would hurt anything. I wonder, though, about the inclusion of the iframe in the description for the Mother's Day specials item. Is there any way to comment that out, just to see what happens?

[Joshua Brown]

So is there an alternative? I don't really know much about parsing RSS feeds.

On Wednesday, May 14, 2014 12:08:19 PM UTC-4, jgeerdes [AJAX APIs "Guru"] wrote:

The fact that the API returns a 400 code indicates (to my uneducated non-Googler brain, anyway) that the parser is choking on the feed. However, there can be no disputing that the error codes and messages in the API could be much more clear. Alas, I doubt it will change. The big G has included an April 2015 sunset date for the Feeds API into its TOS.

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Jeremy R. Geerdes

Generally Cool Guy

Des Moines, IA

If you're in the Des Moines, IA, area, check out Debra Heights Wesleyan Church!

http://www.debraheightswesleyan.org

[Jeremy Geerdes]

What happens if you copy the feed into a conventional file and publish it with a .rss extension?

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[Joshua Brown]

I have no idea how to do that. The feed is coming from a 3rd party blog software package that we did not build.

[Joshua Brown]

The API Playground could not load http://sweetbriargolfclubrwd.qa.aztekhq.com/rss.xml, just like the .axd feed. I think it's something in our servers. Thanks for your input.

[Joshua Brown]

I was able to roll my own simple parser using the jQuery ajax() function. It's probably not super robust, but it does the job, and it doesn't choke on our dev/qa server.