Xanga RSS Fixer
by Josh Staiger
Since switching to NetNewsWire as my feed reader software of choice, the RSS feeds for my friends with Xanga blogs quit working.
The problem, as it turns out, is that Xanga does not generate correct RSS for their feeds. It does not validate. This is quite unacceptable for a site as large as Xanga, and I've heard that they've been unresponsive to people pointing this out to them.
To fix this, I have written a Perl script that will fix up Xanga feeds to generate well-formed RSS. I'm running the script on my site and anyone who cares to use it is more then welcome to do so:
Running the script without parameters will present you with a prompt for a Xanga username.
Alternatively, you can pass the user parameter directly. This is the address you would put into a feed reader:
/XangaRssFixer.pl?user=XangaUser
Naturally, we now get a nice happy validation message.
The sourcecode is available here: XangaRssFixer.pl
I'm licensing this under the MIT license so in case Xanga happens to be reading this, they can use it to fix their shizit.
I have also created a project page here which essentially restates what this entry just said.
Enjoy!