Testing and Fixing your Feed

While you're building your feed, there are things you can do to test that it's working you way you want it to. Once you've published your feed, you may find that some posts are creeping in that aren't what you wanted. Here's how to test and improve your feed.

Previewing the Feed

Here we're going to create a feed in which we just want pics and videos of Harry Styles:

We'll start by setting up a basic feed that looks for text including Harry's name, tour and album names, and checks if the post has any of an image, video or gif.

First, while we are building the feed, we can hit the "Preview Feed" button to see what's currently falling within our feed instructions:

Note: be patient, it can take a couple of minutes to generate a live feed.

If our feed doesn't show us what we're expecting, we can go over to Bluesky and search for a post that we think should have made the feed.

Testing Specific Posts

Here's one that I think should be in the feed. It's a great photo of Harry:

But it's not in our feed. Why not? Let's grab the url for this post.

If we come back to Graze, we can paste this url in our test pad by clicking on the test tube:

This test will load the post, and colour it red or green depending on whether it passes through the filters we've set.

Here you can see the results of the test. If it's marked with a "1" it has passed and is green. If it's marked with a zero, it's red and has failed. This post passes by having an image attached, but fails because none of the words in the post are in our word list.

But wait, we found this post by searching for "Harry Styles" on Bluesky. How did Bluesky know it was Harry in the image, but our feed didn't?

If we have a look on Bluesky, we can see that the user who posted this used alt text (rock on!) to describe what was in the image:

So, how do we make sure this shows up in our feed?

Let's pop in an another word list, but this time, we'll get it to check the alt text on images:

Brilliant. OK, let's re-run our test, by hitting the refresh arrow:

Rats! we've failed again! Let's look at why:

Now you can see the post is passing because it has an image, and passing the alt text, so what's wrong? It's failing the first word list because our logic says "all of these" -- that means it has to have Harry in the text of the post and in the alt text. Whoops! That's not we wanted. Let's tweak it.

We'll pop in a new "any of these" logic node to wrap around our word lists:

This means we're looking for all posts that have the words either in the text of the post or the alt text of the image.

One more time on the test?

Greens! Greens across the board!!

Once we've done a few of these tests, and are happy with how our feed is operating, we can publish it to Bluesky.

Then we can watch how the feed populates, and improve it each time we see something sneak in that we don't want there.

Eliminating Unwanted Posts

Let's check in on our Harry Styles feed on Bluesky. Oh no! This post shouldn't be here:

Okay, so we have a couple of choices. We could take "fine line" out of our word list, because it may be an amazing album, but it's also going to catch a lot of other things: drawing posts, anti aging posts etc. Or we can pop in an excluding word list to try and keep album posts, but exclude the others:

Now if we run a test with that post url, we can see it's properly excluded:

Ok, but back on Bluesky, it's still in the feed. What can we do about it? We have a few options.

We can wait -- as the feed populates with more posts, this will get pushed down and eventually ignored.

We can hide individual posts in the Feed Builder on Graze -- click on the three dots beside the unwanted posted and chose Remove From Feed:

We can Backfill the feed, (using the Backfill button in the settings for our feed). This will clear the entire feed history and refill it using our new logic.

Or we can take the nuclear option and clear the whole feed and start it populating again (using the Clear Feed History button in the settings for our feed) which may make sense if sensitive content has crept in.

Keep an eye on your feed for the first couple of days, and refine it until it's perfect!

Posts missing on Bluesky

One little gremlin we've noticed is a situation where your Graze preview feed looks great, but when you come across to Bluesky, posts that were there are suddenly missing.

One thing to check is your language settings on Bluesky. It's possible that you have your Bluesky settings set to show you posts that are in English, like this:

If a post is not marked as being in English, it won't show up for you on Bluesky, even if it's being correctly added to the feed.