RSS 2.0

January 28, 2005 9:45 AM

How about a proper RSS 2.0 feed? The existing .91 feed doesn't provided authors or even datestamops. Also, the existing ATOM feed doesn't validate properly and doesn't work in the two RSS readers I use (NetNewsWire and Thunderbird).
posted by xmutex to feature requests at 9:45 AM (8 comments total)

Good pony. Metafilter routintely breaks in my newsreader, where no other feeds do. Something with XML character encoding I think? I haven't tracked down the exact cause.
posted by chundo at 10:33 AM on January 28, 2005

I have a RSS 2.0 template around here somewhere, and yeah the atom feed was more of a pain in the ass than something that actually works any better.

I may just replace the 0.91 one with a 2.0 feed and drop the atom one, since it doesn't really work too well.

Metafilter routintely breaks in my newsreader, where no other feeds do. Something with XML character encoding I think? I haven't tracked down the exact cause.

Other feeds are usually built with blog tools that have all the character encoding issues in XML worked out. I code in fixes as necessary, but you never know what crazy high-ascii character someone will submit tomorrow.
posted by mathowie at 10:56 AM on January 28, 2005

Can you write some function that just parses any high ASCII character out entirely?
posted by xmutex at 10:57 AM on January 28, 2005

How about RSS 3.0?

I wanna read it in Notepad.
posted by timeistight at 1:41 PM on January 28, 2005

timeistight, interesting ideas for 3.0, but no html? sure, plain text is nice and all, but if a post contains urls (as is the point of metafilter), why should we have to cut and paste those links into a browser? i like seeing the accompanying images for posts to boingboing and endgadget in my rss reader (feedreader), and eliminating html would significantly reduce my user experience, not to mention make comic rss feeds dead. maybe i'm just missing the point of rss.
posted by Igor XA at 2:24 PM on January 28, 2005

haha, "make dead." i think i meant "kill."
posted by Igor XA at 2:25 PM on January 28, 2005

I'm pretty sure Aaron was joking, Igor XA, though in the byzantine world of blog syndication it can be hard to tell. I think this was merely intended to annoy Dave Winer.
posted by timeistight at 2:35 PM on January 28, 2005

Add encoding="ISO-8859-1" in the ?xml thingy at the start of each feed. That'll fix your high-bit problems.

Then add $desc=replace(replace($desc,"&","&amp;") ,"<", "&lt;") to the description code (and make sure no other escaping happens before or after). That'll fix your ampersand problems.

That's all you need to do in both formats. btw The latest draft version of Atom is way simpler.
posted by cillit bang at 11:30 AM on January 29, 2005