@christianv, the way it is now, if there are no alerts in the feed, "alert" will not appear in the feed.   If this is a problem for you, i can change the backend to include an empty alert hash in the case of there being no alerts.  Otherwise, if you make direct reference to alert.title, wouldn't you get a syntax error?

In any case, I'd like to have a chat with you about how the dummy file contracts should be designed, especially for these types of cases when objects like this (or student_info, in the status feed, for example) are absent.