the Japery  §  Japus Gassalascus, Expectorator.

because ye were neither hot nor cold, I will spew you from my mouth

Another pub(l)ic spectacle from the New Pantagruel

My Pandybat Comes Out for Bad XML

June 19, 2005

TNP is tired and fed up with fine blogs that offer RSS feeds which, when picked up for syndication here, fail miserably. Typical problems: Repeated excerpt fields (Get Religion, Armavirumque), fatal errors in the XML that cause the feed to drop dead (recently corrected by Bill Powell is Alive), unclosed tags that cause sites picking up the feed to be polluted by unwanted boldface, italics, or hyperlinkage all over their own content (Ut Unum Sint), abominably long posts and no excerpt field that over-run the syndicating site (once or twice of late, The Revealer), embedded images that over-run the syndicating site, and non-standard characters that come through as gobbledygook.

TNP’s web-lackey has, in the past, corresponded with many of these people and others, even offering technical assistance in correcting the problems. I find this kindhearted coddling unacceptable, completely unacceptable. From now on, all offending XML feeds thought to be worthy of TNP readers will be recipients of Father Jape’s Golden Pandybat award, potentially to be administered in person or by a suitable sub-enforcer/minion.

Never seen a pandybat? They are rare nowadays, and flat, unlike this simple cosh, whose initimidating appearance is yet approximate to that of the doughty pandy.


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I missed the debut: Father Neuhaus has commenced blogging, albeit in the monologic fashion common to print publications that adopt a blog. Unfortunately his RSS feed unloads the full text of multiple entries and contains numerous non-standard character… [Read More]

Tracked on October 11, 2005 08:32 PM

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