For news aggregator jockeys out there: I’ve just spent the afternoon overhauling the main Subtraction.com feeds (and brushing up on my meagre XML skills). You’ll notice, on the home page, a new little table in the right-hand column which lists links to the XML feeds, available in the standard RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom flavors. They even describe what you can expect in terms of feed content, so there are no surprises. (If you’re looking for a different kind of feed, perhaps one with comments appended, just let me know, and I’ll pass the request on up to the Feed Development and Publishing Department.)
Similarly, I’ve also added feeds to the Elsewhere section, again in RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom flavors. Feeling industrious, I started working on feeds for the various rating pages as well, so that you can follow, say, all of the five-star links via news aggregator (thereby reducing even further the reasons one should leave one’s aggregator, much less one’s home), but those are being a little troublesome. I must admit that this XML stuff, easy as it seems, confounds me.
Validate Me
Aside from those ratings feeds, these should all come up smelling like roses when run through Feed Validator. I’ll get around to fixing the ratings feeds soon, I think, once I clear the biggest hurdle to getting things validated at all right now on this site: the litany of bum characters embedded in URL strings throughout the Elsewhere section — they’re causing some headaches with feed validation, and they are the sole reason that this site’s home page won’t validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. I’m working on a fix for that — it should allow the main entries as well as these feeds to pass validation test — but I’m surprised a solution isn’t more readily available on the Web. Surely someone else has encountered this before, right? Maybe I just didn’t search thoroughly enough.
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Booyah!
Hubba hubba!