When is a feed a feed?
Jan 3, 2007 — It has been our experience from putting lots of RSS newsfeeds on our websites, that many of them do not appear to function well on a website. That seems strange, but then again, this is the Web, and there are many variations on a theme.
There’s a website, xml.com that takes the time to describe the seven different types of newsfeeds and gives examples of each. It also refers to an O’Reilly book, “What Are Syndication Feeds” by Shelly Powers. Now, it goes into the depths, but also provides some of the answers to troubling questions that arise.
This site, for example, is powered by a software package call WordPress. It supports the three most popular RSS formats, but as a default, it offers RSS 2.0, the latest format. We are going to change that to RSS 1.0, for good reasons.
Blogger at Google.com, a free, software-less blogging outfit, by default only provides feeds in ATOM and RSS 1.0 formats, according to the book, with no other options.
Most RSS readers wil accomodate most of the feed formats, but not all.
So, if you are looking for one of your news feeds on one of our websites, you must realize that the basic software on our content sites evidently does not support RSS 2.0, either. As far as we are aware it only supports RSS 0.91 and possibly RSS 1.0. We are working on ways to make that more capable.
In fact, our original website is still basically an html site and has no intrinsic RSS capability. We are able to show the TempSensor.net news feed through the help of a third party website that converted the RSS 0.91 feed into Javascript.
Seems there’s never a day that we don’t learn something new!