Wednesday 3 March 2021

Health checking feeds

It was always the intention with feeddirectory.org to add some value to the URLs that are stored in it. One of these value adds is the ability to report on the health of a feed. This is done by checking each URL that's stored on a regular basis - at most once per day. 

Only very basic checks are performed:

  • Get the HTTP response code
  • Check the if the XML document is well-formed

This information is then passed back with API calls that return URLs in a feed-health section:

         "feed-health" : {
            "last-status-code" : 200,
            "is-valid-xml" : true,
            "metadata" : {
               "title" : "No Such Thing As A Fish"
            },
            "last-fail-check" : {
               "timestamp" : null,
               "epoch-millis" : null
            },
            "last-good-check" : {
               "timestamp" : "2021-03-03T20:15:18.569+00:00",
               "epoch-millis" : 1614802518569
            },
            "last-checked" : {
               "timestamp" : "2021-03-03T20:15:18.569+00:00",
               "epoch-millis" : 1614802518569
            }
         }

This information will be refreshed regularly. There is no separate API to refresh the health of a URL, they will be refreshed automatically and the updated information returned in subsequent API results.

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