Forums: Back End:

We've just finished a site with a currency RSS feed. The feed has been running without problems for about 6 weeks - then, as Murphy would have it, it screws up a day after launch.

This is the source of the feed.

ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/rippy/exchange/?M=R&B=ZAR&F=USD,EUR,GBP&T=B&S=O&I=L

This is the error message:

Unable to open RSS Feed ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/rippy/exchange/?M=R&B=ZAR&F=USD,EUR,GBP&T=B&S=O&I=L with error HTTP ERROR: 304, exiting

As that suggests a "not modified", how about adding a random number to the querystring?

Apparently, 304 means 'not modified'. Usually this relies on some sort of hash (etag) in the request which it compares with the current file to see if it's changed. However from the sound of it, the software is throwing a 304 regardless. What software are you using to serve the RSS feed?

I use RSS2html to process the RSS feed, and been using it for a couple of weeks without incident. guerilla.co.za/stuff/currency.zip

Oh BTW, the feed works fine for me.

As it does for me. It's only on the site that it is screwing up.

Oh sorry, I wasn't paying attention.

OK, so a quick glance at the code suggests that the author didn't bank on getting a not-modified header, so treats it as an error. If you look at line 526 in FeedForAll_XMLParser.inc.php, it throws an error if the HTTP status code is less than 200 or more than 300.

Since you're not caching the feed data, you're going to have to ensure that a 304 is never returned. Try scud's idea of appending a random string to the feed request. If this doesn't work you're going to have to store the feed data and return this cached version when you get a 304.

BTW, It might be that the supplier of the feed has had problems with excess load and has instigated this not-modified header to reduce it. So circumventing using cache-busting might not be a popular choice.

Thanks - that didn't work. ***** burns down small villages ***** Should I replace the RSS2html with something else? Any suggestions with what?

God, I'm such a designer.

Hmm...well I just installed your script on my server and it works fine for me. I'm beginning to wonder whether your server specifically is being excluded by this feed. Do you have permission to use it?

From the source site:

...please remember that I'm an amateur, providing these on a rented server which I pay for out of my own pocket, without advertising nor any other direct sources of revenue. So: please don't overload my bandwidth with excessive hits. Standard practice in the RSS community is to consider a refresh rate of up to once per hour acceptable, and I won't in general consider your use abusive if you stay within a reasonable factor of that. For feeds that only update infrequently, however, it may be more appropriate to use a lower refresh rate. If you are running a server which takes a lot of hits from the general public, it would be preferable for you to cache the files on your end instead of passing those hits through to me.

Thanks Stickman - I'll try that.