As you all probably know, the aggregated Perth Blog Feeds were broken for a bit there. While the html version was working ok, the RSS 1 and RSS 2 feeds failed to validate and would break some news readers.
Well, I’ve made some progress with the planet aggregation code and now it works a lot better. Pardon me while I go into a bit of technical detail here. The dc:creator elements in the feeds were occasionally getting stray greater-than or less-than symbols in them, making validation break and busting news readers. I added HTML escaping into the template for the dc:creator elements, and now that problem has gone away.
The original source of the problem hasn’t gone, however. You’ll still see the occasional stray greater-than or less-than symbols showing up in some posts in the feed. There is some interaction between the source feeds and what comes out of the aggregator leading to stray stuff getting left in the feeds.
Strangely, it gets a lot worse if I include the feed from Robert Corr’s Kick & Scream. Why? Not sure. Nothing about his feed looks strange or broken. I’m not sure, will diagnose that one next.
Erk. Can you email me details of the problem and I’ll try to fix it?
Robert,
I haven’t gone very far in diagnosing it yet. Though, if I add your feed in, then it breaks the RSS output from planet (planet is the aggregator) :-( You’d hope planet would insulate the output from the input but it doesn’t seem to.
I’ll have a look this afternoon and email you something…
-graeme