Feedly 404 Feedback Loop

NOTE: This article is out of date and likely obsolete.

I set up 404 Notifier when I moved my Les Mis commentary to its own blog, to catch anything I might have missed while getting content moved and the new site set up. I then added the RSS feed to Feedly.

After a few weeks, I started noticing some odd links showing up to /r/bienvenu, but I couldn’t find anything that linked to that URL. Then I looked closer and realized it was Feedly itself that was hitting the link!

Basically:

1. Broken URL gets hit.
2. 404 Notifier adds the hit to the feed.
3. Feedly retrieves the feed.
4. Feedly follows the URL!
5. Return to step 1.

The timing is inconsistent, but I think Feedly might be hitting the URL whenever I look at the list of “articles,” maybe checking for an image to use for the card in magazine view. And based on the first instance in the DB, I think it may have been a URL I used to test the plugin when I first installed it, then forgot.

For now, I’ve just removed the feed from Feedly. I’m considering altering the plugin to skip hits from Feedly, but I can probably just turn it off now that the blog has been up for a month. It’s served its purpose. If anything, it might make more sense to put it on this site to see if I missed any redirects (though I haven’t actually removed the old copies of the posts yet).