Donut Age: America's Donut Magazine

RSS troubles

I noticed recently that my RSS feed had not updated in my aggregator (NetNewsWire Lite) even though I'd made several new posts. Then I noticed that, in fact, NNW had downloaded the updated feed, but was not showing the newer articles. Further digging revealed two issues, at least one of which was contributing to the problem: 1) There was an unencoded angle bracket in the Napster post (Tinderbox assumed that I was manually adding an HTML tag , which is usually right, but not this time), and 2) there were a pair of (properly encoded) em-dashes in my last post, that a validator said were not legal (which, I think, has something to do with what's allowable in RSS 0.92). Damn those pesky entities!

So for the short-term, I am going to a headlines-only RSS feed (still 0.92). I think I can manage to keep any potentially troublesome characters out of my titles. For the longer term, I've been meaning to upgrade my feed to RSS 2.0 — which, if I understand correctly, will give me better support of rich text, including entities, in the body of newsfeed items — anyway, so I will take this opportunity to stop putting that off and get that done.

So anyway, to my three-and-a-half loyal readers, sorry for any confusion, and look forward to a wonderful, new feed in the near future (i.e., before summer).