How does one go about figuring out a 500 error?

[Mary Gardiner]

On Sun, Mar 07, 2010, C.J. Adams-Collier wrote:
> Check the web server logs for details about why the url handler didn't
> return HTTP headers?

Presumably these are feeds served by other people and fetched by his
Planet install, so it's not clear to me which server logs you mean.

My suggestions:

 1. visit the feed URL in your browser

 2. if it's not clear from the browser access what the problem is, have
    a look at HTTP headers. Some browsers can do this (perhaps with a
    plugin), or you can use the Perl program HEAD (all capitals)

You can also run Planet in DEBUG mode, this may or may not help.

I think the uninformative 500 error is a limitation of either Python's
URL fetching code or possibly Feedparser. It is often the error returned
when a feed is unreachable (hostname doesn't exist or request timed
out).

-Mary