Feedrabbit Blog

Feedrabbit has intermittently been slow during most of August, sometimes returning very slowly and other times timing out. This was caused by a significantly increased number of requests to the Feedrabbit front end which impacted creating and editing subscriptions, but did not impact backend feed processing. The significant increase in requests were coming from bots. This issue has been resolved and the Feedrabbit web site is now responding to requests promptly.

Feedrabbit has always tried to fetch feeds every 60 minutes for all users, however over the last 6 months queues have continued to grow and Feedrabbit has not been achieving that for any users. From today, the fetch interval for feeds used only by free accounts will change to a 3 hour interval, including feeds where the web site designated a quicker poll rate or time-to-live field (often common with status page and alert feeds). Similiarly feeds that haven't updated for more than 7 days will now also only be fetched every 6 hours. Premium accounts have not changed and should see quicker feed fetching.

Feedrabbit will now display the Fetch Interval on the subscription page indicating this change.

Between 7:36am and 8:31am AEST (UTC+10) on 2nd April 2021, we experienced an outage of the Feedrabbit web site and background job processing services. During this time our web site and feed fetching service experienced intermittent DNS resolution failures of both internal and external domain names. The outage was caused by a global Microsoft Azure Network Infrastructure service "DNS issue".

Background feed fetching and subscription delivery is catching up and will return to normal shortly.

Please get in contact if you've got any questions.

Between 4:59pm and 5:31pm AEST (UTC+10) we experienced an outage of the Feedrabbit web site and background job processing services for all of our customers. During this time our web site had response times of up to 57 seconds and for a few users a Feedrabbit specific error page was displayed with the sad rabbit.

The outage was caused by an unplanned and unreported outage of our SQL Database managed by our hosting provider Microsoft Azure in the US East region where Feedrabbit is hosted. This outage did not appear on the Azure outage status page and may have been isolated to a small number of Azure SQL Database instances. During this time we were unable to view database metrics, but web application metrics show the significant increase in response time.

No emails were lost, background feed fetching has automatically continued from where it was and emails are being delivered as per usual.

Between 2020-08-08 04:58:46 UTC and 2020-08-09 12:14:54 UTC Feedrabbit's background job processing services failed to process subscriptions for everyone. The issue was caused by a few feeds that had 6.5MB feed items (yes, individual items) which Feedrabbit's HTML scrubber failed to handle and silently sat there attempting to process the HTML content of these items unsuccessfully. Unfortunately I don't have monitoring for this specific situation, but will be looking at adding that and have plans to rework the job processing pipeline. Feed item content is now truncated to 512KB per item, this fix has been deployed and by 2020-08-09 13:41 UTC Feedrabbit has caught up with all pending jobs.

The effect of this outage means that all emails that should have been sent during this time were not, however no emails have been lost, the backlog has now been processed and subscription processing has returned to normal.

Please get in contact if you've got any questions.

Unfortunately we can't have nice things. Someone has a bot registering accounts on Feedrabbit likely to clean their email list since Feedrabbit performs validation of email addresses. The bot has slowly been creating accounts using different IP addresses over the last few months but today they've created over 40 accounts in a few hours. This hurts Feedrabbit's email reputation because the real owners of those email addresses didn't sign up for Feedrabbit and some of them hit the spam button in their email clients for the sign up confirmation email.

From today, Feedrabbit now uses Google's reCAPTCHA for account signups, hopefully this can stem the flow of false user accounts. I'll look at implementing an automatic account clean up for unverified accounts soon to clean up the junk from the database. reCAPTCHA usually only requires ticking the "I'm not a robot" box, so apologies if it makes you fill out some puzzles.

In addition to daily digests, Feedrabbit now supports weekly digests. When you select "Digest" you'll be able to choose which days of the week you want to receive your subscription email, you can choose just one day or multiple, feed entries will be queued up ready for your next digest email.

Existing daily digests will remain daily, and daily will remain the default for new digests.

Feedrabbit will now send an email notification if a feed has failed to fetch for 24 hours. This gives you the opportunity to contact the web site owner if there is a problem, or remove dead feeds.

As usual with this type of administrative email, it is sent to the primary email address of your account, not the email selected for the subscription delivery.

From a customer request an additional checkbox has been added to the edit subscription page to disable the table of contents in digest emails. There are various reasons why a table of contents is unnecessary for some feeds so you can now selectively disable it.

Between 12:41am and 5:47pm AEST (UTC+10) our background job processing services failed to process subscriptions for our customers. The issue was caused by the volume of work and the order of processing, a fix has now been deployed which has resolved the issue.

The effect of this outage means that all emails that should have been sent during this time were not, however no emails have been lost, the backlog has now been processed and subscription processing has returned to normal.

Please get in contact if you've got any questions.

Between 2:28am and 9:42am AEST (UTC+10) we experienced a full service outage of the Feedrabbit web site and background job processing services for all of our customers. During this time our web site returned a Feedrabbit specific error page with a sad rabbit. The outage was caused by our hosting provider because of a "partial service interruption" to most Microsoft Azure services in the US East region where Feedrabbit is hosted. The issue has now been resolved after over 7 hours, Microsoft have reported that the root cause was an "underlying Storage memory consumption issue".

The effect of this outage means that all emails that should have been sent during this time were not. No emails were lost just delayed, the backlog was completed by 9:59am AEST. Sorry for the disruption, however today's incident follows several outages caused by Microsoft Azure over Feedrabbit's lifetime, unfortunately our future plans to migrate away from Microsoft Azure have not seen any progress.

Rising from another feature request I've just implemented support for plain text emails. If you'd like just the raw text from a feed, feel free to enable this option for realtime or digest emails.

If you've got any feedback on how they look please let me know.

A couple of weeks ago I implemented support for subscription filtering after the feature request from one of our premium users. Today I'm announcing it with an explanation of how it works with examples:

• Simple match: dog includes only posts with "dog" in the title or body
• Title match: title:dog includes only posts with "dog" in the title
• Body match: body:dog includes only posts with "dog" in the body
• Quoted match: body:"big bird" includes only posts with "big bird" in the body
• Negate match: -celebrity excludes all posts with "celebrity" in the title or body (can be used without a normal match to just exclude posts)
• Multiple terms: dog -title:celebrity includes only posts with "dog" in the title or body, excluding posts with "celebrity" in the title

All terms are matched like Google Search, there is currently no support for performing an "OR" comparison.

Currently this is a Premium account only feature, however it may become a feature for all users if the demand is there. Thanks.

Earlier this month I improved the billing page so that premium members can see their payment history including each subscription period and its status, as well as adding support for users to update their payment method.

Thanks again to those with Premium accounts, your support is appreciated.

Many times feed authors keep web sites online but don't post any new content. Feedrabbit will now display how long it has been since a feed was last updated (when the last post was more than 6 months ago), this obviously makes it easier to find subscriptions that you are no longer getting any value from and may like to unsubscribe from.

Over the last 12 months Feedrabbit has accumulated heaps of feeds that are failing to update because the origin web site no longer exists or they no longer provide the feed. I will be removing broken feeds from Feedrabbit once they have been broken for 6 months.

Starting 18th November 2015 Google will no longer provide XML feeds for Google Calendar, existing subscriptions to these feeds will stop working at this time. Google will still provide iCal feeds, however Feedrabbit does not yet support this format.

There are a few Feedrabbit users that have subscriptions to Google Calendar XML feeds, feel free to get in contact if you'd like to continue subscribing to a calendar and you believe the iCal feed would help you.

This deprecation follows Yahoo discontinuing their whole Yahoo! Pipes service on 30th September 2015, and Facebook deprecating RSS feeds on 23 June 2015.

As mentioned recently support for sources other than RSS and Atom are on the table, so please let me know if you want support for something.

Time has really passed by lately as today marks one year exactly from the end of Feedrabbit's private beta and its soft launch. Many hundreds of users are making use of this little side project, and there were 5 users that upgraded to Premium accounts during that time.

I started this service because I was unhappy with what was available in the market, so I'd like to thank everyone who has signed up and are enjoying their stream of custom content. Because Feedrabbit doesn't pay my bills I've not had a lot of time to put into it during this calendar year, however over the next year I want to incrementally improve things and I have a whole pile of things I've been looking into including:

• Direct Twitter and Facebook subscriptions, especially since Facebook killed their RSS feeds
• Improving the subscribe workflow to reduce the burden of registering an account explicitly
• Infrastructure improvements to support more users and feeds
• Month-by-month Premium plan, while retaining an annual plan
• Restyling of emails to remove cruft like inline formatting and hardcoded massive image widths that make emails look bad in email clients, this should make for a much more consistent reading experience
• Content diffs to support notification of updated posts
• Notifying users of persistently failing feeds, as the number of dead feeds have increased lately
• Advertising in free plan emails, I know this one is likely contentious however necessary to ensure a continued service, but I promise they won't be overtake your content

Obviously these things will take time, so if you are interested in any of them or have a different feature request make sure to drop me a line. I'll follow up with updates here on the blog as they progress.

-- Cheers, Jono

Between 1:49pm and 5:08pm AEST (UTC+10) we experienced a full service outage of the Feedrabbit web site and background job processing services for all of our customers. During this time our web site returned a service unavailable message. The outage was caused by our hosting provider because of a "partial service interruption" to Microsoft Azure App Service (formally Azure Web Sites) in the US East region.

The issue has now been resolved, Microsoft have reported that the issue has been mitigated, and are yet to report on the root cause. Microsoft Azure App Service has an uptime SLA of 99.95% which has not been met today, a 99.95% uptime SLA means Microsoft has committed to providing a service that has no more than 22 minutes of downtime a month. Today's incident follows last month's outage caused by the same Microsoft Azure service, and another one late last year. This isn't acceptable to us and we have future plans to migrate away from Microsoft Azure App Service to provide you a better customer experience.

The effect of this outage means that all emails that should have been sent during this time were not. No emails have been lost, subscription processing has returned to normal, and the backlog has now been processed. Sorry for the disruption, as we endeavour to provide a reliable service.

Please get in touch if you've got any questions.

Between 5:19am and 11:32am AEST (UTC+10) we experienced an outage of our background job processing services hosted by our infrastructure provider for all of our customers. The issues have now been resolved and required our intervention to stop and restart the infrastructure. The root cause has not been determined, however there are future plans to ensure this component is made more resilient.

The effect of this outage means that all emails that should have been sent during this time were not. No emails have been lost, subscription processing has returned to normal, and the backlog has now been processed. Sorry for the disruption, as we endeavour to provide a reliable service.

Please get in touch if you've got any questions.

Just a quick update on a new feature that came from a feature request. If you wish to deliver an RSS feed to a mailing list, then you will likely want to suppress the Feedrabbit email footer so that your own unsubscribe links can be appended. Feedrabbit now allows Premium users to do just that.

Tips: if you are using Feedrabbit to forward a feed to a mailing list you will want to:

• Use an additional email address rather than signing up with the mailing list addresss, as account emails like password resets are sent to the primary email.
• Ensure that the subscription's schedule is manually configured to either realtime or digest to ensure that it doesn't automatically change.
• Hide the email footer, as per this blog post.

Get in contact if you've got any questions.

Feedrabbit now supports multiple email addresses under the one user account. You'll now see a "Deliver To" field on the subscription edit page that allows you to select which email address the subscription will be delivered to, while additional email addresses can be added via the settings page. Your primary email address will be used for all account related notifications including account changes, billing receipts and password resets.

With the introduction of the "Deliver to" field the existing "Gmail plus address" field has been removed to consolidate the user experience and because of confusion some users have experienced. These "plus" addresses are now referred to as "tag addresses" to remove confusion with their association with the Gmail product. The hope is that a single drop down of all email addresses and an improved user interface for creating these addresses will provide the best user experience. All existing data has been migrated.

Additional email addresses is a Premium only feature, however tag addresses remain a feature for all users.

Not that it should affect anyone as Feedrabbit is a completely online service, but we/I moved office on Friday. We (as a group of companies) jumped over the Brisbane river moving about 1km from South Brisbane to Milton, we are now in part of the old Wotif offices.

Based on user feedback using time sensitive feeds, the default 60 minute polling wasn't adequate. I've changed the polling to poll quicker if the feed's publisher allows it, otherwise the default 60 minute polling continues. If you'd like to know if a feed is polling quicker than every 60 minutes, the poll interval will be displayed next to the Feed URL on the subscription details page (e.g. 5min poll).

Currently the quicker polling is based on the <ttl> (time to live) field specified in some RSS feeds, like those from the Country Fire Authority (CFA) of Victoria, Australia.

Welcome to the Feedrabbit blog. Feedrabbit publicly launched 5th September 2014, and now serves a couple hundred users. As a new service I'm working to ensure it provides the functionality our users desire, so please get in touch if you have feedback.

If you aren't already using Feedrabbit, no problem get started today.