Monday, February 12, 2007

On the suckitude of certain RSS feeds

Dear Blogger*,

you may remember that I have complained many times in e-mail and once here about the godawful suckitude of the software that generates RSS feeds. Having upgraded to the ex-beta Blogger2 I am saddened but not in the least surprised to find that this is still crap—but in a new and exciting way.

Two problems of the old feed software have been solved: all posts are short-form, and the strange jumping back and forth between paragraphs of some feed items no longer appears (in this sample of posts). Well done! Thank you!

However: the new software has a new bug which is every bit as irritating as those: it has no understanding of "newness."

I've been going through my archives, applying labels to posts that deserve to be thus hauled back into the limelight, and your software has picked up on this. The RSS feed now lists the twenty-five most recently labelled posts, some of which are three years old. No post which was written in 2007 appears in the feed.

This is absurd. Surely your software can be made to distinguish between "new" and "modified?" And furthermore: is your software really unable to tell the difference between editing content and applying a label?

love and kisses
Udge


* not you, dear blogreading person! I mean the company named "Blogger."

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8 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, THAT's why I see such a mashup of old "new" (new old?) posts showing up in so many blogger blog's feeds! I was beginning to wonder if it was my RSS reader at fault.

Anyway, just a HI from Vancouver from a new reader. I forget how I wandered here, recommended by some other blogger, and have enjoyed and stayed.

February 12, 2007 at 6:53:00 p.m. GMT+1  
Blogger mark drago said...

ha, Udge, this is funny. (for your reader, not you).

February 12, 2007 at 7:46:00 p.m. GMT+1  
Blogger rb said...

suckitude, haha, my word-of-the-day

February 13, 2007 at 12:39:00 a.m. GMT+1  
Blogger CarpeDM said...

Yeah, you can always tell who has become a Beta Blogger by how the content jumps up on bloglines. But, you know, sometimes you get to reread past posts and enjoy them all over again.

February 13, 2007 at 6:21:00 p.m. GMT+1  
Blogger JoeinVegas said...

Well, opportunity for a good programmer here - come up with something yourself and you could have the next YouTube and get $160 million selling it back to Blogger.

February 13, 2007 at 10:03:00 p.m. GMT+1  
Blogger Unknown said...

interesting and funny..

February 14, 2007 at 2:50:00 p.m. GMT+1  
Blogger Udge said...

thanks everyone, I would find it funny too if I didn't find it so goddamned annoying :-(

February 14, 2007 at 10:41:00 p.m. GMT+1  
Blogger SavtaDotty said...

Udge, I knew it was time to retire when I no longer expected software to work. Ever. Sigh.

February 15, 2007 at 7:45:00 a.m. GMT+1  

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