Re: [syndication] Re: Expanding Syndication of Content

[Jason Brome <jason@methodize.org>]

Loren,

Quoting Loren Baker <lorenbake@yahoo.com>:
> Any other tips from the Masters of Syndication?

Just a few things I noticed about your RSS feed.  First, the Processing 
Instruction (<?xml version="1.0" ?>) should be the very first thing in the 
document.  In your feed there are a couple of spaces between the Processing 
Instruction and the start of the file.  This may cause a problem with 
aggregators that are strict in their parsing of RSS documents.

Secondly, I believe that you are using an invalid date format in pubDate 
elements.  Take a look at the RSS 2.0 spec at 
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss for more information on the format of 
the pubDate element.  Specifically, the format is based upon RFC822, although 
modified to use a 4 digit year.  The format specifies three letter identifiers 
for day and month, whereas your feed contains the fully-spelled day and 
month.  Also, the hour is a two digit military-style hour, prefixed with a 
zero where the hour is < 10.  

Finally, the <image> tag should have at least the three mandatory nested 
elements - <url>, <title> and <link>.  Again, refer to the RSS spec doc for 
more information.

A great resource when building RSS feeds are the feed validators, an example 
being that of the Feeds project at the Internet Archive.  Here's a direct link 
to the validation results of your feed:

http://feeds.archive.org/validator/check?
url=http://www.webadvantage.net/rss.xml

This URL may wrap in certain email readers, and therefore you may need to copy 
it onto one line.

These are all minor issues that are easily resolved, and will (hopefully!) 
ensure successful syndication of your content across a wide range of 
newsreaders and aggregators.

Best regards,

Jason

-- 
Jason Brome
jason@methodize.org
http://www.jasonbrome.com/