Xanga gets their RSS House in Order
by Josh Staiger
When I got home from work this evening, I noticed something odd about the Xanga feeds I'm subscribed to in my feedreader - they were all marked as unread.
A quick glance at some of the RSS Xanga is generating reveals what looks like RSS 2.0.
And indeed, FeedValidator confirms this as valid RSS 2.0 (well, with some warnings about relative URLs, but still valid).
After one full year of frustration, Xanga finally gets it right.
To continue supporting those who may be subscribed to Xanga feeds through my site, I've modified my Xanga Rss Fixer script so that it now simply passes through the valid RSS with some *very* slight modifications. It does still fix the relative URL warnings to make FeedValidator completely happy, but I think that at this point we can say that the fixer is pretty much obsolete. It had a good run.
In spite of now being one with the RSS 2.0 spec, Xanga continues to do some semi-brain-dead things with their feeds - like putting dates in the entry title fields. I've gotten some requests to replace this with an entry excerpt, so perhaps that will be my next trick (hello REXML, nice to meet ya).
For now - kudos, Xanga.