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RSS feed not refreshing

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espanae

03 Apr, 2012 06:22 PM

One of our feed blocks (a tumblr RSS feed) is taking several hours to refresh. The only way I've been able to force refresh it is by modifying the URL (for example: http://unioncollege.tumblr.com/rss to http://unioncollege.tumblr.com/rss/index.xml). It then continues to cache for several hours. All of our other blog feeds seem to be working fine.

Feed Block: http://unioncollege.tumblr.com/rss

1. 1 Posted by espanae on 03 Apr, 2012 06:34 PM

   

   This is what the feed block showed before I forced it to refresh. It was missing three new items.

   Also, we experienced this before but our system admin can't think of any reason why it's happening now.

   • cascade-rss-caching.jpg 77.1 KB
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2. 2 Posted by Bradley Wagner on 03 Apr, 2012 08:38 PM

   

   Can your systems admin explain what the problem was before? Perhaps this will help us root it out as well. We've seen this in a few instances with different clients and are still trying to get to the bottom of it.

   Can you also try the following:

   • Reload the Feed Block within Cascade. View the source and attach the raw XML source to this discussion.
   • Access the server that is running Cascade and run a utility like cURL from the server itself: curl http://unioncollege.tumblr.com/rss and attach the raw response to this discussion

   We're trying to determine if the caching is happening at the application level or possible at the server/network level.

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3. 3 Posted by espanae on 04 Apr, 2012 04:42 PM

   

   Thanks for the response Bradley. I don't think it's happening at the Cascade level. It looks like it may be a network/server issue.

   I tried parsing the tumblr RSS feed with a PHP script and it also fails to refresh the feed when a new blog post is added unless I modify the RSS URL.

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4. 4 Posted by chaoaj on 04 Apr, 2012 04:54 PM

   

   Eric,

   You may want to check a firewall setting for allowed hosts. We've been
   getting a spinning page load for our Wordpress blog feed links since WP
   subscribes to the IP of the
   Week club and changes their IP's weekly(or so it seems). Do an nslookup
   and make sure you can get to all the tumblr.com host ips from a curl
   command on the cascade server. If not, you may need to have someone add
   these to an ip table or something similar on our border firewall or
   machine room firewall settings.

   Regards,
   @lvin
   ------------------------
   Alvin Chao ­ IT Web
   JMU - MSC 5734 - Massnutten Hall 293
   Harrisonburg, VA 22807
   540-568-6206
   [email blocked]
   http://educ.jmu.edu/~chaoaj

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5. 5 Posted by espanae on 05 Apr, 2012 07:54 PM

   

   Alvin,
   Thanks for shedding some light on the nature of working with RSS feeds. I wasn't aware of this issue. I found a work around using the Tumblr API v1 (http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api) and so far haven't noticed any issues.

   Erik Espana
   Associate Director of Web Communications
   Union College
   Office (518) 388-6745
   twitter.com/erikespana

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6. Bradley Wagner closed this discussion on 05 Apr, 2012 08:20 PM.