In the whole blogroll and rss feed nudging of the last few days after Crafting {:} a Life, Luisa Carbonelli alerted me that my blog hasn’t updated in 41 months….according to the Feedly rss reader. And when I tried it myself I got the same result: ‘unreachable’.
That seemed odd, so I took a look at my server logs. Indeed Feedly requests for my feed all get a ‘403 not allowed’ response.
My server’s error log shows the reason why. Because feedly in its request says it is ‘like Feedfetcher-Google’, it triggers a filter to block bad bots. After all there’s no Feedfetcher-Google anymore, so anything pretending to be it can be denied access.
However Feedly is a useful service, and strictly speaking not even a bot, as it reduces the requests for info for all Feedly followers to just one fetch of my feed.
I submitted a ticket with my hoster asking them to allow Feedly, [UPDATE:] which resolved the issue later today.