Feed Canary: get notified if your RSS feed breaks!

[Dan Q]

I accidentally broke my RSS feed earlier today. But I didn't need to wait until my RSS reader told me (I subscribe to my own RSS feed as a safety check!)... because I use Feed Canary!

Within minutes of me breaking my RSS feed I got an email to let me know. How cool is that?

Anyway: I'd completely forgotten I was using Feed Canary until it saved my bacon, today. So I just wanted to share it with you in case you'd like to use it, too. It's free and it's ethical; give it a go!

[candycanearter07]

On one hand its a cool concept, but couldn't you achieve a similar effect by just subscribing to your own RSS feed? Most readers will notify you if theres an error in a feed, and I feel like it would get a bit annoying to get multiple emails while youre rewriting a feed and stuff.

[Dan Q]

On one hand its a cool concept, but couldn't you achieve a similar effect by just subscribing to your own RSS feed? Most readers will notify you if theres an error in a feed, and I feel like it would get a bit annoying to get multiple emails while youre rewriting a feed and stuff.

I do subscribe to my own feed, but I find Feed Canary spots errors faster than the frequency with which I check my feed reader. Some days I'll only read my feed reader twice a day, but Feed Canary polls my feed five or six times an hour.

I've never found it annoying because it only emails you once, when a feed is broken, and then once again when it detects that it's repaired. So far it's only emailed me... probably four times in the six years I've been using it? Very tolerable.

I don't edit my feed manually; I generate it programmatically, so the chance of it repeatedly flip-flopping from valid to invalid and back again is pretty slim! But even if I did, and so it would, I can't imagine this happening: after being told it's broken, I'd fix it and then run a validator on it, I imagine?

So yeah: I find it helpful and reassuring. I have automated and scheduled items and it's nice to know that it'll pick up on things faster than I would. But I've got a very active RSS feed, too (220 items so far have been added to it in 2026 alone, in my main feed!), so it's perhaps more helpful for me than it would be if, say, I was manually adding only one item a week or so.