Dev-Picayune

Unfortunately, the Blogger Buzz: Layout Solutions proposal to fix my layout issues has nothing to do with the problem I am having. Obviously, others have complained and now they are working on a more thorough solution. The good news in the whole situation is that this is forcing me to redo my .XSL and such to more correctly wrap my content. Whereas before I was wrapping each entry in a <p> block element, now I am using a <div> block. This simplifies stuff like blockquotes since I don’t have then stop and restart paragraphs on each side of it… thus making my content cleaner and less apt to contain non-compliant markup. Unfortunately, now I have to fix all 3 blogs and attempt to fix any entries where I tried to deal with paragraphs and blockquotes. What a mess. Another positive thing is that this blog now has the improved permalinks. Hooray! I need to roll out the rss2 feed for both this blog and the main wilcoxzone site. I also need to improve the photo album handling for the wilcoxzone site and add more albums. At least that involves adding more content rather than just design.

One of disadvantages of being dependent on Blogger for my blog is that when they stop populating feeds correctly, it affects me big time. The current issue is that they are inserting a extra DIV tag INSIDE the paragraph for the blog. How this worked for any template is beyond me. They better fix it quick or I will be forced into building my own blogging engine… ugh…

Several (and appologies for not providing links) bloggers and columnists have remarked lately about the problem with RSS (to one degree or another) and that is that it isn’t really very simple. I don’t mean to say that the XML part of it isn’t simple because I find it pretty straight-forward (although I find the RSS 1.0 spec to be a bit uglier at times). The ultimate problem going on is that there is a lack of a reliable mechanism to deal with RSS feeds.
One proposal has been to create a “feed://” protocol or list links that way and have the RSS reader register itself as the default “feed://” reader. The problem with this method is that there really isn’t a “feed://” protocol. RSS feeds (ultimately just an XML file) are typically served via HTTP.
The other part of the problem is with integration between the browser and the RSS reader. Firefox has resolved part of the problem by at least identifying most pages that have RSS feeds and allowing for a very simplistic method for getting at the feeds. The Sage Plug-In for Firefox simplifies this further by being integrated into the browser and really handling the feed management (and discovery part) quite well. But Sage has a couple of drawbacks… What if you don’t want to start your browser to read RSS feeds? What if you want to archive all entries from blogs you read? Or search within all the entries across all those blogs?
Thunderbird email comes with RSS reader capabilities that appear to go slightly beyond Sage (in terms of reading and searching, etc.), but just adding a feed to it is painful (I have found importing my Sage OPML is more useful). But ultimately, between the default behavior of downloading the message (and formatting) from the web-site and then not being able to change that without deleting and readding the feed, Thunderbird seems to fall extremely short of ideal. This is a real shame since to me, the email program is the ideal place for the RSS reader to live. Ultimately, if you look at RSS like individual email messages from someone, it seems to make sense to keep it in the same place.
I’ve looked at several other RSS readers like BlogBridge and now most recently RSS Bandit. One nice thing with RSS Bandit (as compared to its awful name and icon) is that it does register itself as a feed:// reader and therefore, with an additional plug-in to Firefox, I can just click on the RSS icon in Firefox to register a feed in RSS Bandit. But now I end up with a large additional client piece of software that lives outside the browser and outside my email program.
When you look at the effects of the problem, what you end up with is a slightly tricky technology (RSS) that is being underutilized because people don’t know what it is and when they do try to use it, find it clunky to use or can’t get it to work at all. So what’s the right solution?

If you are looking for a small but effective guide to best practices related to xhtml or html markup, look no further than Dave Shea’s mezzoblue Markup Guide. It isn’t totally complete yet, but it looks like a nice start. It’s short enough that you can actually read through it in a few minutes or refer to it later and actually find what you need. The one thing I have been guilty of has been using the <b> and <i> elements instead of using <strong> or <em>.

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.