Feed Sign in with OpenID OpenID

Simon Willison’s Weblog

RSS 1.0 feed now available

I’ve set up my first new syndication feed using RSS 1.0. I’ve checked the feed against this RSS validator and it seems to pass, but throws a warning that item descriptions are meant to be between 0 and 500 characters in length. As I want to provide the full contents of my entries in the feed (for people using aggregators such as AmphetaDesk) I’ve decided to ignore the warning and leave it as it is.

Posted 11th September 2002 at 4:12 pm

This is RSS 1.0 feed now available by Simon Willison, posted on 11th September 2002.

View blog reactions

Next: New form of spam protection

Previous: Flash applications

8 comments

  1. Personally, I'd rather see it with a channel title (did you mean to leave that blank?), but blank item titles, and with short (HTML-free) descriptions but the full item either entity encoded or in a CDATA section, in a content:encoded element. But then, I'm using Aggie, which I think is the only thing currently supporting content:encoded (maybe NetNewsWire does - I don't have a Mac to check). Most people would say that 1.0 forbids entity encoded HTML in the description element, and that a well-behaved aggregator would display <p> (at least in anything but 0.92/2.0). For your next feed, could we have a 1.0 feed of the most recent 15 comments? It makes the "what do I use for x" problems in your entry feed look simple, but, um, I need it. Please?

    Phil Ringnalda - 11th September 2002 16:38 - #

  2. Oops, make that "would display <p>", and could we have a comment preview and working cookies (doesn't seem to be remembering me, anyway)? Demanding today, I am.

    Phil Ringnalda - 11th September 2002 16:40 - #

  3. OK - I've fixed the title tag problem (that was a mistake on my part, I meant to have blank item titles but edited the wrong bit). I think I'll do a bit more research on the HTML encoding side of things, and possibly make two feeds available (one with and one withoput) depending on what I find out about aggregator support for HTML. A feed for comments sounds like a great idea - I'll try and put that together today. I'll code cookie support back in now but the comment preview may have to wait a few days. Thanks for the tips :)

    Simon Willison - 11th September 2002 16:51 - #

  4. Comment cookies should be working now.

    Simon Willison - 11th September 2002 18:27 - #

  5. Descriptions that are 500 characters long are a restriction in RSS 0.91, gone in 0.92. I guess the validator bases the description tag on RSS 0.91's one.

    michel v - 11th September 2002 19:40 - #

  6. By the way, why would you have blank titles when your permalinks show that your entries actually have titles ? I'm confused there ! About the entity encoded HTML, that's when numeric entities are useful (and why I compiled a converter from html to numeric entities in the first place).

    michel v - 11th September 2002 19:43 - #

  7. The permalink things aren't really titles - they're just permalink identifiers and I don't think they would serve well as titles. They're actually meant as a kind of in-joke, every now and then I'll put something bitchy in the permalink that I didn't include in the actual post, just to see if people are paying attention :)

    Simon Willison - 11th September 2002 20:26 - #

  8. How about using mod_content, as in content:encoded, for the full item content? The description is supposed to be just an abstract of sorts, perhaps the first sentence or so. Also, the webMaster element is not in RSS 1.0, I don't know why the validator doesn't tell you this. You could use dc:publisher and/or dc:creator instead. Same goes for language, this should be dc:language. Other than that: Great to see.

    Morten Frederiksen - 12th September 2002 09:19 - #

Comments are closed.

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2002/09/11/newRSS10Feed

A django site