Sharp as a Marble - I guess it was me after all

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Blogging

I had thought the gunnie-blogosphere had been a bit quiet over the past week or so. I had plenty of stories show up in my RSS reader, but when I started seeing incoming links from blogs I read that I didn’t see elsewhere, something made me go ‘hmmm’.

Turns out, RSS Bandit had partially crapped out. It was refreshing some feeds, but not all. So, looks like I missed several hundred posts over the course of a week.

That kind of sucked. Sorry guys and gals if I’ve appeared to ignore you!

posted @ 1/5/2011 8:32:34 AM

Comments

julie says:

on 1/5/2011 9:07:41 AM

you always ignore me ... sniffle, sniffle

jed says:

on 1/5/2011 8:43:28 PM

Actually, RSS sucks. I sorta knew this, because I remember the early days, when Dave Winer tried to fix it, and there were arguments about what it should be, etc. And Blogger finally said the heck with it and developed Atom.

I used to use Bloglines. They went under, but there was a migration to another service, which they weren't actually completely forthcoming about, so I decided I'd just pull feeds directly, and aggregate them locally.

Gawd!

I haven't tried writing a parser from scratch, but I'm thinking about some grotesque regex thing to pull content. The RSS library I'm using isn't tolerant of poorly formed XML, and there are some hosts who don't play nicely either. I can get some feeds to update regularly, others not. I often see XML parse errors -- things such as some doofus plugin appending a script tag after the closing RSS tag. So, in order to really get all my desired feeds to work, I have to pre-process the problematic ones before running them through the XML parser.

I'm completely unsurprised at any aggregator missing data.

Robb Allen says:

on 1/5/2011 8:48:10 PM

RSS Bandit does RSS and Atom. This is the first time this has happened to me, so it's not a big issue. Shutting it down and reopening it fixed everything. Probably a memory issue.

And I've written my own parser. As long as it's valid XML, it shouldn't barf. The fact that people can't seem to output valid XML does scare me though.

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