In the Dark

[rejectomorph]

Next door they were hammering and drilling all day, so I didn't get very good sleep. I finally woke fully about half past twelve, and if I hadn't arisen then I'd have gotten no sunlight today. A bright blue sky graced by a spume of thin clouds was quickly replaced by a mottled gray mass of tumbling stratus as afternoon passed. Despite the stormy appearance, no rain has fallen yet, but the air certainly has the scent that precedes a shower. Should rain come tonight, I doubt it will amount to much. More likely there will be thunder showers higher up the mountains, and nothing here.

---

The LJ syndicated feed of Brad DeLong's Daily Journal quit updating a couple of weeks ago, so yesterday I checked the syndication status on the feed's user info page. It said that the last time the site was checked, it was "too big" to fetch. Today, it says the same thing. The last update of the feed was March 6, so I checked DeLong's archive and found that, within a period of less than an hour (the frequency of LJ's checks for updates on sites with feeds), he had posted three entries, two of which had graphs in the form of .jpg files totalling almost the whole 300KB LJ allows for a feed. The text apparently put it over the top.

It seems that when LJ checks for an update at any given site, if there has been no update recently fetched it looks back through quite a few unfetched entries, and as a result of this action the amount of material that would have to be fetched to update the DeLong feed has been greater than 300KB ever since those big entries of March 6. This happened to the same feed about a year ago, and it was several months before it began updating again. This makes me wonder how many LJ syndication feeds get cut off in this way, and for how long? I'd say there's a design flaw here that makes LJ an unreliable source of syndicated posts, and despite the convenience of having the feeds on my friends page I'll probably switch to another source altogether.

I'd expect that there would be a some way of fixing this glitch in LJ's syndication system, but the fact that it's already been there for over a year suggests to me that it isn't going to get fixed anytime soon. I also doubt that putting in a support request would do any good. Checking the request board, I saw a couple of old open requests concerning other feeds classified as "too big", so it looks as though the support volunteers are clueless on this issue. Heh. LiveJournal, where everybody gets to twist in the wind together.

Comments

[paul.livejournal.com]

I bet that is why a lot of the comic strip feeds I used to watch all stopped working one day. 10x 30kb comic strip and bingo, feed dies. And of course you don't get anything about it on your friends page, so there is a good chance you simply forget about the feed, unless it is something truly unmissable.

[scottobear.livejournal.com]

I've been using google reader for most of my feeds, and many of my lj-readees that don't post private posts very often (yourself included!) works a lot better than lj for plain vieing, but allows you to go to the original site for comments, if needed.

[rejectomorph]

Sounds likely.

I've wondered if LJ might have done a poor job when creating the syndication feature, but what are the odds of that? [/sarcasm]

[rejectomorph]

Looks like Google will eventually rule teh whole intarnetz.

Opera will fetch feeds and lets you read them in it's e-mail window, or you can click the urls to open them on the original site in an Opera tab, but I've never gotten into the habit of using that particular feature.

[scottobear.livejournal.com]

same for mozilla and safari, but both seem... I don't know.. cumbersome, somehow, despite the convenience.