Google’s Feedburner just voided RSS URLs for CNN, Marketwatch, etc. | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Feedburner just voided RSS URLs for CNN, Marketwatch, etc.

100 pointsmarban23 comments

It seems like Feedburner removed custom domains so some major feeds like http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition.rss (+ all others) http://feeds.marketwatch.com/marketwatch/topstories/

are now down.

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It looks like there is really no reason to use Feedburner anymore. It seems that Google just implemented the bare minimum to avoid completely breaking URLs (or at least they tried and apparently missed some cases). It seems that it is now just a bit-for-bit proxy of the original feed. There appears to be no WebSub support anymore, no stats, no "feed preview". Really all it does now is change the URL (and maybe some caching?).

It would be nice if they added an option to redirect the feedburner URL to an external feed to aid moving off of it but that doesn't appear to be an option at the moment. Although with the `self` link preserved a few readers will likely attempt to migrate to the source URL, however the vast majority probably won't.

They have acknowledged the issue in the Feedburner Help Group

https://groups.google.com/g/feedburner/c/v33UeXJv6Go

  Brian Walker
  1:22 PM (1 hour ago)
  to FeedBurner Help Group
  Hello everyone, we are currently getting reports of a feed outage. This is an intermittent issue that we are currently addressing and the issue should be resolved within the next few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience and working to get the issue resolved ASAP.

Brian is amazing, so unlike Google to have an actual engineer respond when you have questions.

Workaround for now: Try to guess the url based on the original pattern, so this will work: https://feeds.feedburner.com/rss/cnn_topstories

Services like FeedBurner used to be needed for Podcasts because badly written podcast catchers would poll the RSS once a minute without any regard for caching or taking any indication of when the next episode is due. Is this still the case?

I mean, it's still the case, but web servers can shrug off rapid polling a lot better now than in 2004.

FeedBurner used to do a lot more (analytics, resyndication awareness, custom content/ads) before Google rot set in. A lot of that is easier to do now than it was 15+ years ago.

did you know Google Analytics is going away in 2023?! it seems like Google is exiting the public web Analytics sphere (perhaps to avoid looming monopolies or anti competitive suites)

That’s not even remotely true

Any source for this? It's completely new to me and seems like the worst idea possible. They get so much valuable data from people using it..

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en

Universal Analytics will be going away

Last updated: March 16, 2022. Visit this page in the coming months for the latest information.

Google Analytics 4 is our next-generation measurement solution, and it's replacing Universal Analytics. On July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits. If you still rely on Universal Analytics, we recommend that you prepare to use Google Analytics 4 going forward.

That's not exiting the business. That's making a big upgrade that isn't backwards compatible. Probably to weed all the thousand of dormant sites that slapped GA on their sites then never got any traffic.

I got burned by this. Feedburner has been dormant for years but they recently picked up development and have pushed a redesign of the admin and are trying to modernize. This is not the first time a bug cropped but it's by far the worst. My estimation is that this was a careless but honest mistake. Still it got me out of bed to fix it.

A year or so ago, the XSLT stylesheet for some feeds (podcasts? news?) on FeedBurner linked to dead apps whose domains had gotten bought up by casinos and porn. Not a great look. I've tried really hard to get in touch with someone at Google about this but couldn't find anyone. Not sure if it's fixed now, but it's a great signal to GTFO FeedBurner as soon as you possibly can.

Are there any good alternatives for Feedburner for professional bloggers?

Host you own RSS Feed under your own Adress? Then you have the advantage, that you control the URL/Address. The Load is not that big if your feed is a Static file.

I think people really underestimate throughput of a simple file server serving static files.

When serving static files, even something like old school apache can serve a couple thousand requests/second on relatively anemic hardware. That's billions of requests/year. The average podcast doesn't really need this.

Even at google's scale, if all their content was static, they wouldn't need that many servers. The hard parts of scale is keeping everything in sync in a distributed system designed to make sure your content is fast everywhere and managing the sheer amount of compute for the dynamic side of things.

There's been no need for it for more than a decade. Just cache your feed if traffic justifies.

The usefulness of services like this is gone. I run a podcast hosting service and recommend everyone stop using FeedBurner and similar services. They provide no technical benefit and you're handing over control of your feed to a third party.

We work with lots of podcasts that were created in a time when Feedburner was standard operating procedure. We were already seeing reliability issues with Feedburner on those feeds this week (intermittent 500s), but if they really broke or removed custom domains, it's going to be a long weekend for our teams.

Yesterday, feeds.wnyc.org/science-friday was down. Today it redirects to https://feeds.feedburner.com/science-friday

Yes, but those custom domains are not always universally replaceable with feeds.feedburner.com.

Although since the new "proxying" is so simple even that has:

   <atom:link href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/feeds/segments/science-friday" rel="self"/>

So it seems like the best option is just going to the source feed.

Messing with anything RSS should be considered terrorism against the Internet itself.

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