IFTTT – Why Does It Dislike This RSS Feed?

if-this-then-thatrss

I'm trying to get IFTTT to send me an email from this minimal test feed I created:

http://iftttrss.99b273199898d3dbd62e8db4ad65cf7f.madis.db.bcinfo3.barrycarter.info/

IFTTT accepts the feed when I add it, but the logs repeatedly say things like:

Feed Trigger Error about 6 hours ago
An error with Feed prevented your Recipe from working.
After five consecutive errors your Recipe will reset.
If errors persist, visit the Help page for support.

The Help page is, of course, unhelpful.

Here's what the feed looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?><rss version="2.0">
<channel><title>iftttrss.99b273199898d3dbd62e8db4ad65cf7f.madis.db.bcinfo3.barrycarter.info</title><description>DB_QUERY</description>

<item><title>Untitled</title><link>http://barrycarter.info</link>
<description>title: 2014-11-03 16:49:05, date: 2014-11-03, time: 16:49:05, </description>
<guid>9ff63fad584a8cfad58370f874c9a8d7d9642ead</guid>
</item>
</channel></rss>

Thoughts?

Note that simply editing the feed until it works isn't a great option, since IFTTT appears to check feeds only once every 3 hours(?).

Since the feed isn't rejected when I add it (like some of my older attempts were), I'd have to wait 3 hours between each test or something like that.

UPDATE: I deleted and readded the RSS action, and ifttt.com tells me this:

created 4 days ago
never triggered

My access logs, however show:

198.58.102.158 iftttrss.99b273199898d3dbd62e8db4ad65cf7f.madis.db.bcinfo3.barrycarter.info - [09/Nov/2014:18:50:04 +0300] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 696 "-" "Superfeedr bot/2.0 http://superfeedr.com - Make your feeds realtime: get in touch"

So I'm confused. This feed just prints the current time and date and is thus constantly changing.

Best Answer

Julien from Superfeedr here. We are polling and parsing feeds on behalf of IFTTT. I just things on our end and, at this point, we are able to fetch and parse the feed... However, it's ugly:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<atom:link href="http://iftttrss.99b273199898d3dbd62e8db4ad65cf7f.madis.db.bcinfo3.barrycarter.info" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
<title>iftttrss.99b273199898d3dbd62e8db4ad65cf7f.madis.db.bcinfo3.barrycarter.info</title>
<link>https://github.com/barrycarter/bcapps/blob/master/bc-run-sqlite3-query2.pl</link>
<description>DB_QUERY</description>

<item>
<title>Untitled</title>
<link>http://barrycarter.info</link>
<description>title: 2014-11-10 09:34:26, date: 2014-11-10, time: 09:34:26, </description>
<guid>http://Untitled</guid>
</item>

</channel>
</rss>

Make sure you add real content in it and make sure it propagates (wait at least 15mins because you do not support PubSubHubbub apparently for now).

Add an entry like this

<item>
<title>My First entry</title>
<link>http://barrycarter.info/link-to-by-first-entry</link>
<description>The content of my first entry</description>
<pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2014 03:41:14 GMT</pubDate>
<guid>guid-for-my-first-en</guid>
</item>

Make sure you adda pubDate to your items too... this will only make things easier :)

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