More RSS

I took it upon myself to add an RSS 2.0 feed to the site (it kind of makes sense that I would take it upon myself because it’s my website and no one’s going to do it for me  :P) . You can find a link to the feed in the menu on the left.

I also spent quite a bit of time making sure that the new feed (2.0) and the older feeds (1.0 and .91) validated. The 1.0 feed validated right away, but the other two took a while. The problem had to do with the insertion of HTML (i.e., href and img tags from the posts) into the description tag of the feed.

I tried removing Movable Type’s encode_xml and remove_html variables from the RSS templates, and then adding my own CDATA tags (a tag that the encode_xml subroutine inserts). The problem with this method is that it would break the validation on 2.0, but not .91, or on .91 but not 2.0, etc.

Kept getting the error, "description should not contain relative URL references," among others. Apparently, 2.0 won’t let you have relative URLs (e.g., /archives/foo.php), which is how I link to all my past entries and other things throughout the site.

To make a long story not as long, I changed every instance of a relative URL throughout the site (save the menu) to a fully-qualified URL, thinking that this would alleviate my 2.0 validation problems. It didn’t. Even though there were NO instances of relative URLs throughout the feed, the validator insisted that there were. I was beginning to think that the problem was with the validator and not my feed.

Chugging along, I put the remove_html and encode_xml routines back in and now, with those added and the relative URLs modified, all of the feeds validate.