RSS 2.0 feed test

December 16, 2005 2:44 PM

RSSdorkfilter: Here is a proposed RSS 2.0 feed complete with timestamps, tags, and author names added. Here's how it looks in bloglines. Is there anything missing for any app writers that use the feed? (paging Rothko...)
posted by mathowie to feature requests at 2:44 PM (12 comments total)

Woo!
posted by cortex at 3:30 PM on December 16, 2005

While you're dicking around with RSS feeds, maybe you could look into the unencoded ampersands issue? The Metatalk feed recently stopped validating for the same reason.
posted by Galvatron at 3:30 PM on December 16, 2005

By [e-mail] on travel vicarious

The @example.com is kind of weird.
posted by rhapsodie at 3:37 PM on December 16, 2005

But otherwise it looks really cool. Thanks, Matt!
posted by rhapsodie at 3:38 PM on December 16, 2005

The "author" field requires a fully formed email address (stupid fucking spec if you ask me) so I used the generic mail server name for it.
posted by mathowie at 4:03 PM on December 16, 2005

You can solve the author email problem by either:
a) Switching to RFC 4287 (and not just because it has my name on it)
b) Switching to dc:creator. All this requires is renaming the author tags to that and adding xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" to the rss tag.

Other than that, I'd prefer the main name in the author field to be the username. Using the person's real name looks weird.

(also, hacking a byline onto the body is incredibly lame)
posted by cillit bang at 4:26 PM on December 16, 2005

Thanks, Matt. Will look into this as soon as I get back. I appreciate it.
posted by Rothko at 5:44 PM on December 16, 2005

Nice!

A couple of minor points:
* As I understand the spec, you actually want to have a separate category element for each tag, rather than stuffing all the tags into one category element.
* If it's not too much trouble, it might be neat to have comment counts on each post. You can do this using slash:comments (originally built for RSS 1.0, but works in 2.0 too). It's pretty easy to do:
change:
<rss version="2.0">
to:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/">

and add to each item element:
<slash:comments>the comment count for the post</slash:comments>
posted by moss at 6:50 PM on December 16, 2005

moss, I had one category per tag before, but bloglines just took the first one and ignored the rest, so I went back to one category field. I know parsing a space comma delimited string is suboptimal for anyone programming with the feed though so I might just put it back.

I did comment counts before, but every reader out there interpretted any change in an item's content as the item being "new". Are you sure the slash comments hack gets around that?
posted by mathowie at 7:45 PM on December 16, 2005

I think slash:comments should get around that. (Were you putting the comment count in the description before? I used to do that in the RSS feed for my blog, and had similar problems that went away when I switched to slash:comments--but I also didn't do a whole lot of testing.)

Frustrating that Bloglines won't deal with multiple categories.
posted by moss at 9:00 PM on December 16, 2005

I did comment counts before, but every reader out there interpretted any change in an item's content as the item being "new". Are you sure the slash comments hack gets around that?

Should do. Any program that it causes problems in is broken.
posted by cillit bang at 2:21 AM on December 17, 2005

Related Automatically detect and fix HTML errors. This avoids most of the problems in the RSS feeds.
posted by Sharcho at 3:00 PM on December 19, 2005