[thelist] Re: newsreaders and news aggregators

[Diane Soini]

On Sunday, September 26, 2004, at 04:03 AM,  
thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:
>
> At 18:00 on Saturday, 25 Sep 2004, Diane Soini wrote:
>
>> I would love to find a reader that actually reads the publishDate  
>> field of the RSS XML. The publishDate of the "new" item yesterday was  
>> something like 2003.
>
> FeedDemon does read the publication dates (there's a setting), but if  
> you delete "old" items when it gets the next update it will see all of  
> the items in the feed as new.
>
> does your feed only show the newest? or was the item you refer to, in  
> the feed?
>
> there might also be a genuine bug:
>
> http://www.bradsoft.com/forums/ 
> shwmessage.aspx?forumid=1&messageid=4293#bm4733

Thanks for that info. I'm not sure if he's seeing the same behavior  
described in that forum or not. I'll definitely go lurk there.

The feed file is an entirely manual process. I publish a new item to  
the server and write the XML <item> for the feed, paste that at the top  
of all the other <items> and ftp the XML to the server.

About the only thing that might screw it up is that I did create the  
entire XML file within the last 2 weeks, and during that time I have  
found some misspellings and quite a few of the links, especially the  
older ones, changed. I may have moved the order around a bit, but only  
to make sure the items are in chronological order. Still doesn't  
explain why something turns up as new on a day I didn't even touch the  
file.

Maybe the only other thing to mess it up might be that I've also stuck  
in some extra <tags> so that the feed file can also serve as a database  
for the javascript search tool we use. (like I said, we have no server  
technologies at all.) I have assumed the readers would ignore  
unrecognized tags.

I was impressed that FeedDemon did handle the javascript well. An  
especially nice touch is that it ignores the annoying script in our  
pages that resizes/repositions window. That script really messes up in  
some of the readers.

>
> ;o)
>
> hth
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http://www.cafepress.com/abiegen.13058271