The MetaFilter RSS feed is broken.

August 1, 2001 8:43 AM

The MetaFilter RSS feed is broken. I just was wondering how you were populating the RSS, and got a malformed XML error. You have a stray "&" in one of the descriptions. Also, the "title"s aren't very title-like: "comments on 9412". Just FYI.
posted by misterioso to Bugs at 8:43 AM (5 comments total)

Since people post the links, they sometimes put in illegal characters.

As for the titles, what do you suggest I use instead? Keep in mind that not all threads have a URL description, and some of the main text areas can be in the hundreds of characters.

I thought a bunch of trailing off sentences would be just as useless (Supreme Court rules on Roe...).
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:33 AM on August 1, 2001

Good point on the titles; I'm not sure what an alternative would be.

As far as the illegal characters, and depending on how you generate the XML, you could run a function to search for and replace the evil entities: &, >, <, ", and '
posted by misterioso at 9:43 AM on August 1, 2001

Personally, I'd prefer the trailing off sentences ....
posted by webmutant at 11:43 AM on August 1, 2001

The trailing off sentences work OK for the previous/next links in MeFi, why not for this? Put the thread number in parens after or something.
posted by kindall at 2:11 PM on August 1, 2001

I think the trailing-off sentences idea is ....
posted by dhartung at 1:05 PM on August 2, 2001