Parkrun blocking RSS readers from accessing its RSS feeds? WTF?

2024-02-23 16:07

Parkrun has a news/blog page. This news blog has an RSS feed, at https://www.parkrun.com/feed/. Which I subscribe to with Akregator, my RSS reader of choice.

Searching for some info on Parkrun recently, I came across a couple of recent articles which hadn't shown up on my news feed. And looking at the feed closely, I noticed that the most recent fetches had failed with some kind of error.

I normally ignore feed errors, because sometimes feeds aren't available for some reason (including my computer not being connected to the internet occasionally), and it's not a problem because I'll pick up any missed posts on the feeds the next time a feed is downloaded. But these articles were a week or two old, and so I should have got them recently.

I checked the page sources to see if the feed URL had changed (which happens on some websites sometimes) and couldn't find it listed at all. Interesting. Maybe the feed had been deleted altogether? I tried accessing the feed in Firefox... and there it was. Present in its original location, and seemingly free of errors.

So I tried downloading the feed manually, in order to have a closer look at it, to see if there were any issues that might cause my feed reader to think it was broken - which would be one reason why it didn't show up.

$ wget https://www.parkrun.com/feed/
--2024-02-23 12:00:00--  https://www.parkrun.com/feed/
Resolving www.parkrun.com (www.parkrun.com)... 34.248.148.22, 52.210.236.124, 54.171.25.67
Connecting to www.parkrun.com (www.parkrun.com)|34.248.148.22|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2024-02-23 12:00:00 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

Huh.

That's weird. Reload in Firefox, feed is fine. Re-run wget command, 403 Forbidden. Let's try...

$ wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0" https://www.parkrun.com/feed/
--2024-02-23 12:01:00--  https://www.parkrun.com/feed/
Resolving www.parkrun.com (www.parkrun.com)... 54.171.25.67, 34.248.148.22, 52.210.236.124
Connecting to www.parkrun.com (www.parkrun.com)|54.171.25.67|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 39816 (39K) [text/xml]
Saving to: ‘index.html’
index.html                    100%[==============================================>]  38.88K   200KB/s    in 0.2s    
2024-02-23 12:01:00 (200 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [39816/39816]

It does the same thing with curl. So, Parkrun is blocking access to the RSS feed of its news blog by User-Agent.

It's allowing Firefox, a web browser which doesn't actually provide a useful view of RSS feeds (unless you have an extra extension installed), but blocking actual RSS readers (like Akregator) or home-grown news-reading scripts which use standard cross-platform utilities like wget or curl.

W. T. F?!?!

Edit 2024-03-09: The feed seems to be working again. Yay?

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The difficult part is starting

2019-03-23 12:54
So I've been doing parkrun for a while now, and one of the platitudes that I've had in my head for a while was that "getting to the start line is the hard part".

Just getting up on a Saturday morning at the same time I'd normally get up during the week, having a light breakfast, putting on my running gear, and heading down to the park - that's the tricky bit. If I can just manage that part, the run itself is just putting one foot in front of the other, and how hard is that?

Well, running is actually quite hard. But one of the nice things about parkrun is that you don't have to run the whole thing, and lots of people don't. In fact, you don't actually have to run any of it. There are often a few people who walk the whole way each week, which is fine. Still, you can put as much effort in as you like, and it seems like a bit of a waste to me if I don't put some effort in, so it is actually hard.

Sorry, I'm getting off track a bit. Anyway, one day my brain had a look at the "getting to the start line is the hard part" line I'd been telling myself, from a bunch of different angles, and I realised that it's actually demonstrably true. Trivially so, even.

Every single time I've made it to the start of parkrun, I've finished parkrun. One time I almost gave up at the end of the second lap, but I didn't. However, there have been a number of times where I meant to go to parkrun, wanted to go to parkrun, but didn't. My success rate at finishing parkrun once I've started is 100%, but my success rate at starting is considerably less.

Extrapolating, there are probably fewer than a handful of people each week who start parkrun, but fail to complete it. I'd estimate that the success rate of people who finish any given parkrun once they've started is 99% or greater. But how many people try to make it to parkrun, or want to make it to parkrun, each week, and fail? It's almost certainly greater.

Looking at the event history for my local parkrun, there are normally between 300 and 450 runners each week, with a max turnout of well over 500. On the weeks that have closer to 300 runners, how many of the missing 150-200 do you think are deliberately taking a week off? Some of them certainly, but all of them? No, there are a lot of people out there who mean to go to parkrun each week, who fail to make it to the start line.

Just showing up and getting to the start line is the hardest part. Once you've done that the rest is, well, not necessarily easy, but probably manageable.

There's a metaphor for life in there somewhere...
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The weather gods appear to be favouring me today...

2018-03-17 12:40
...and that worries me a bit.

I woke up this morning, looked out of the window, and it was snowing. As I made breakfast and got dressed, the snowing got more intense.

I decided, somewhat reluctantly, that I was going to go and do Parkrun anyway, because I'm close to a milestone now, and I was being stubborn. I therefore braved the snow to go catch a bus to get to the Parkrun I was taking part in, and watched the snow continue to fall as I got closer and closer to the park.

Then, as I got off the bus and walked the remaining distance to the park, the snow lessened, and lessened a bit more, and then stopped. As did the wind. It was still a bit cold, but the weather ended up being pretty good for running.

I did the run, and got a time I can be very happy with. (Yay!)

Then I walked back to the bus stop, and got on a bus to head home. Not 5 minutes after I got on the bus, the snow started up again, as did the wind. The weather has been pretty horrible ever since.

To all appearances, the snow stopped for parkrun. That's just weird. I'm now worried about what the weather gods will do to balance the situation out sometime in the future, when I'm least expecting it...
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