Welcome to Blogistan|Blogger Nation|Whatever The Hell

[waider]

So all the rad kids over at Boing Boing and the like are full of whoop-de-doo tech hype about their status as "citizens of Blogistan" and other such nonsense. In the course of tooling with an RSS aggregator I noticed that Boing Boing's feed wasn't updating the lastBuildDate flag, so as far as a good aggregator is concerned the page hasn't been updated since some time in July. I mailed one of the Boingers about this, and got a reply to the effect that it wasn't their problem because Blogger generates all their RSS.

The nice thing about belonging to "Blogger Nation" and being an "a-list Blogger" is that you don't have to give a toss for standards, evidently.

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

That's odd, because NetNewsWire always picks up BoingBoing's RSS feed up to date. Not that Blogger hasn't had issues with generating RSS feeds, mind you.

[waider.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible that NetNewswire disregards what BoingBoing claims is the publishing date in favour of taking the date it last noticed a change in the feed. I'm toying with coding this way, but indeed, Blogger is a source of much evil RSS. Most of the hacks I've had to do to make things fly have been to cope with stupidity in Blogger's output. Couple that with the fact that the "standard" Perl module for parsing this stuff, XML::RSS, is incomplete, poorly documented, and badly written, and you have one IRRITATED WAIDER.

As opposed to one IRRADIATED WAIDER which would be a different thing entirely.

[candice.livejournal.com]

XML::RSS has been the bane of my existence at times.

And I don't even -write- perl, I just "publish" a few RSS feeds. A friend (psionic) wrote an aggregator that I use from time to time which tends to break on such simple things as different looking URLs.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I'm gradually learning what's broken and what's not, and how to cope with the brokenness. But mainly I find it's a good idea which has been savaged by people failing to make even half-hearted attempts to follow the specs.

Also Dave Winer whining about it at every possible opportunity.

[bitpuddle.livejournal.com]

It is a scene, man. Damn the content. Damn the technology.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I am indeed damning the technology on an almost daily basis.