Rubenerd

Simon emailed yesterday to say my blog RSS feed could no longer be parsed properly. He correctly identified it as a missing namespace issue. Thank you!

I’d added Google Base to my feed, but upon seeing RSS validators choke on it, I removed it. Either these validators are outdated, or simply can’t parse entirely-valid XML and RSS feeds. I can see now why this caused animosity in the past from the likes of Dave Winer.

I removed the namespace and what I thought was all the other elements, but I hadn’t removed <g:from_location> from each post itself. I’ve fixed this now.

It’s a shame, I was looking forward to using the Google Base namespace for declaring personal details in a feed that future applications could pick up, in lieu of using a social network. It’s no surprise the original spec is offline, but you can find the elements declared elsewhere.

I make it no secret that my blog also serves as a testbed and learning tool. Much of what I know about static site generators, content management systems, TLS, and FreeBSD as a webserver, all come down to my over-engineering and breaking stuff here.