Rodent Regatta

Everyone’s talking about RSS. Some mean Atom. Some mean 0.92. Some mean 2.0. Then, there’s the whole notion of feeding on these feeds with a feed reader.

Textpattern is wrestling with the proper production of feeds as a standard feature of the software.

I used the test files provided in the Textpattern support forum and subscribed to them using FeedDemon 1.6.0.11RC2. A screen in FeedDemon looks like this after the subscription.

What needs to happen now? Here’s a portion of an email discussing the subject:

It looks like, in the list, FeedDemon is displaying the exact contents of the feed items, without any HTML entity decoding. On the right hand side, it’s displaying the HTML source. I’ve no idea why, other than that the RSS spec in particular doesn’t explain how HTML should be encoded and decoded. The Atom feeds are definitely done right, so this could be a FD problem.

The bottom line boils down to whether or not the test files are somehow wrong or whether FeedDemon’s current release candidate is handling them wrong. If Nick reads this, perhaps he can take a look for the benefit of Textpattern and FeedDemon users everywhere. Better still, if you’re a RSS genius, give the folks at Textpattern and/or FeedDemon some help. Me? I’m just the messenger.