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."

An open letter

Dear Blogger*,

I think it's utterly wonderful that you are working on the new! improved! Beta Blogger. Bravo, hurrah.

HOWEVER, in the two years that I've been blogging, your RSS feed generator has been and remains to this day a piece of crap. Let's leave aside the fact that it usually reports a half-dozen items as "new" although only one of them was, even though this defeats the purpose of an RSS feed.

We can even leave aside that it ignores the blog's settings (which say that all items should be short-form) and seemingly at random puts up excerpts or the whole post.

What really bothers me is that when it does put up an excerpt, it often mangles the content of the posts. Consider its version of my previous post:

The text of Orhan Pamuk's acceptance speech has been published at the Nobel Prize website (yes, of course there is one). It's a marvellous piece of writing, full of love and insight and closely-observed realities of life. The writer's secret is not inspiration I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. It's a long piece, 6200 words, but don't

That was the entire first paragraph, followed without indication by the first 6 words of the second paragraph, and then a huge jump to the last twenty words of the third paragraph, then the first 8 words of the fourth paragraph, then it just trails off in the middle of

Disturbing, isn't it?

Tell me please, dear Blogger: What in Hell's name is that supposed to be? And why haven't you bothered to fix it, or at least to reply to one of the dozens of e-mails or formal bug-reports that I've sent? The only "response" that I have been able to detect, is that it's now impossible to find an e-mail address for Blogger Support on the so-called Help page. Bah.

Rating: not bloody good enough.

love and kisses,
Udge


* not you, dear blog-reading and probably blog-writing person! I mean the company named "Blogger" which is a sub-unit of Google, and which doesn't respond to e-mail or bug-reports.