Broken Instagram thumbnails

It is likely that Instagram regenerates some URLs – I don’t know; I have never had any 403 error for reasons other than using JetPack image optimization. In that case a cached copy of Instagram’s URL would get rendered void after a period of time. I haven’t had users use caching plugins with Instagram, so this is conjecture.

But what I would like to know is how I can prevent this from occurring in the future. Or, when it occurs, how can I be automatically notified so I know to login and clear the page cache? If I hadn’t logged in to clear the page cache, how long would these images have remained broken?

If anything, these questions should be directed towards your caching plugin. How frequently does it monitor the cache it has generated for dead links? How does it notify you of such instances?

Think of this like a TV channel that broadcasts all performances of a play by a troupe in a theatre live. Now you wanted to optimize something, so you taped one performance. But at a later point the playwright made some changes to the play, and the lines are now different (maybe a character was written out and two others were introduced). So the TV channel live telecasts have the new changes … but your copy doesn’t. Would you ask the TV channel why it hasn’t notified you of your copy being out of date?

The case is similar here. Photonic works real-time; its whole premise is showing content dynamically from a different website even if that content is changing (i.e. if you add new photos etc. they should show up without your having to edit your pages). Think of it as a dynamic embed of an external link. To that end it is not the objective or intention of Photonic to monitor your site for dead links (particularly those in a caching plugin’s cache), as by itself Photonic will never generate dead links – all links shown on your page at a point of time are active links generated by Photonic right at that point of time. Are these links constant? Probably – for Flickr, SmugMug, Zenfolio and Instagram (until your post) I have never seen the links change. For Google I know that the links change every 30 minutes, so caching is pointless.

If you want to play it safe, I would advise against caching any page with dynamic external content (not just Photonic, but even if you are including something like a Twitter feed).

OK thanks for that. I think your TV analogy might be a little off though. Your analogy doesn’t really capture what’s happening on my site. In your analogy, my taped copy would always display the same content–it would never display a blank screen. But on my site, that’s not what is occurring. On my site, the content was displaying correctly at one point, but then not displaying at all at another point. Anyway, that’s not important. I think I understand your message.

>> Are these links constant? Probably – for Flickr, SmugMug, Zenfolio and Instagram (until your post) I have never seen the links change.

OK got it. I also have never seen this behavior in the ~2 months that might Instagram feed has been displayed. But, what if the admin of the Instagram account *deleted* a photo from Instagram? Might that result in the behavior I just observed? In that case, my cached page would still point to the previously live Instagram URL, correct? Which would now be broken. But if so, would that be able to explain the 403 error?

>> If you want to play it safe, I would advise against caching any page with dynamic external content (not just Photonic, but even if you are including something like a Twitter feed).

OK got it. But as you suggested, just for posterity, I may raise this with Hummingbird support to see if they have an easy solution/workaround.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by cag8f.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by cag8f.

Might that result in the behavior I just observed?

Yes.

In that case, my cached page would still point to the previously live Instagram URL, correct?

Yes.

Which would now be broken. But if so, would that be able to explain the 403 error?

Yes, I believe Instagram returns 403 errors for URLs that are structurally correct or were once correct.

OK cool. I can’t confirm that the admin deleted some photos in this case, but it’s certainly possible. It’s also something I could easily test. We can call this resolved then. I will now open a ticket with Hummingbird to see if there’s anything I can do about this, or if I simply have to forego page caching on this page. If you want, I can update you on the results.

I have an update to this. I raised the issue with the Hummingbird plugin devs (post here). They essentially said there was nothing I could do about that–if I have page content that might change beyond my control, then page caching is probably not a viable option (unless I’m prepared to live with broken links sometimes). But he did say I can ask you (the Photonic devs) if your plugin has a setting to use JavaScript to fetch changes, since JavaScript will not be cached. Do you? My guess is ‘no,’ or else you may have suggested it earlier. But maybe I am misunderstanding something.

JS is not used for the calls. I made the decision 8 years ago, but the reason is still largely valid: you may have search engine indexing issues if your first render is via JS. See here: https://www.elephate.com/blog/javascript-seo-experiment/. The plain HTML markup for the content is still the safest way to go from an SEO point of view.

OK no worries. Thanks for confirming.