Dev-Picayune

I finally decided to get around to creating my own RSS 2.0 feed for my ScW blog. After much pain and agony, I finally got it to validate. The really tough part was the date. To validate, you must present the date in valid RFC-822 format. Needless to say, Blogger doesn’t give you an RFC-822 date and time. With lots of poking around in my XSLT book, I managed to hack together an RFC-822 date and I finally managed to get it to validate. The advantage of RSS 2.0 is that it’s more extensible for comments and such (not that I have those yet), but also, I am now able to control the permalinks to fit my new system. I’ll be sure to blog more about this in the coming months as I refine and tweak the whole thing.

Ultimately, though, I think I will use one of the Atom to RSS .xsl’s that are already out there. One problem I have with my method (not pulling from the atom feed) is that half of the year, the date and time is wrong by an hour. But now that I have added the feed using PHP, I can change the way the feed is generated without breaking the feed altogether. This is another advantage over the straight atom feed I’ve used. So in the future, look for the atom feed to disappear from all the sites as I switch over.