Netvibes Has Problems Dealing With Large Feeds

19. February 2007, 8:09 UhrVikas Sah

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I use Netvibes as my RSS reader and was very happy with it till I decided to feed it one of the Yahoo pipes aggregated feeds (feed can be found here) . It gave me an error:

looks like this feed is not valid or currently not responding

I went back to Yahoo pipes page and ran the pipe and it worked fine, so I decided to try some other RSS aggregators with this feed. I tried to add this feed as a gadget in Google homepages and it came up fine. Then, I tried Pageflakes and again it worked fine.

I submitted a bug report to Netvibes and got the following reply from them:

The feed is very big that’s why there is some problems under Netvibes.

I checked the feed as per their suggestion using the w3.org feed validator and it gave the following message:

Unable to validate, due to hardcoded resource limits (feed length > 200000 bytes)

There indeed seems to be an issue with this feed but as a end user, this feed is very valuable to me and I can only ask Netvibes as to if Google and Pageflakes can do it then why not they?

The customer service from Netvibes is looking into this issue and I hope to get a reply from them soon.

This got me thinking and I decided to modify the Yahoo pipe mentioned above. I added a truncate block to it to reduce it to top 25 posts only. The modified pipe can be found here. That solved the problem with Netvibes. I would suggest everyone using Yahoo pipes for creating aggregated feeds (or any feed which is large) to put a truncate block so that the feed size is limited.