zerosleeps

I’ve been using Feedbin for 8 years to follow blogs/sites/YouTube channels. A few weeks back Feedbin stopped showing me anything once I’d logged in though. I was getting nothing but an HTTP 500 error and no HTML content at all.

After about 24 hours of this I contacted Feedbin and less than 30 minutes later Ben Ubois (who created and runs the service) replied:

Feedbin had a bug that was actually triggered by: https://zerosleeps.com/feed.json.

The “author” key just has a string value, but Feedbin was expecting an object like author: {name: …}, as the spec describes.

I subscribe to my own feed in Feedbin to make sure it works as expected, and it turns out that I wasn’t following the JSON Feed version 1.1 specification. I’d been off-spec for years, but a change to Feedbin’s code brought the problem to the surface.

Ben had it fixed within half-an-hour, and I immediately fixed by side of the problem as well:

-    "author": "{{ site.author }}",
+    "authors": [
+        {
+            "name": "{{ site.author }}"
+        }
+    ],

I thought it was rather fun that my website could break someone else’s website!