There is a lot of Mangled RSS out their!



Dealing with RSS, OPML and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) at the development front has been very straight forward when working with sites that have 90% of their XML valid! But at this point I am very worried in our deployment of Blubrry.com of the 10% of sites that have completely jacked up RSS feeds.

As locked down as the RSS specification is a lot of people are really butchering there feeds, and it has me worried. You try to think of all the stupid things people will do with their feeds and then how to counter it with code so that it does not introduce some bug on our end.

Angelo the lead developer at RawVoice asked me tonight he said how strict do we want to be on RSS Feed Validation, and as much as I wanted to say that only sites that have Valid RSS feeds would be able to play on Blubrry. I knew that was highly unrealistic. But I told him to throw a series of flags in the database that would alert us to mangled RSS feeds. I am sure some mangled feed will cause us issues I guess thats just a sad fact of doing business on line in a non perfect world. [Nick Bradbury]

About Todd Cochrane

Todd Cochrane is the Founder of Geek News Central and host of the Geek News Central Podcast. He is a Podcast Hall of Fame Inductee and was one of the very first podcasters in 2004. He wrote the first book on podcasting, and did many of the early Podcast Advertising deals in the podcasting space. He does two other podcasts in addition to Geek News Central. The New Media Show and Podcast Legends.