Fixes to ChinesePod Conversations RSS

John
 January 04, 2008, 03:56 AM posted in General Discussion

This past week we've been working to fix the Conversations section RSS feeds. Here's what we did:

  • Fixed bad links (mainly relating to Extra content)
  • Fixed mismatched content/links
  • Fixed RSS feed titles

The RSS feeds were actually a big pain to fix not for technical reasons, but for testing reasons. Google Reader is our RSS Reader of choice, and it seems to be emerging as the dominant favorite out there, besting Bloglines and championed by such influential blogs as ReadWriteWeb. But Google Reader has this caching system that makes changes to an already cached feed really difficult to confirm. As a result:

  1. There may still be some problems we have not caught.
  2. You may not be able to see the fixes right away if you have been using Google Reader for these feeds. 

Thanks, everyone, for your help in identifying the problems with these feeds, particularly Phil (who even sent me screenshots) and LostInAsia. If there are still problems, let us know and WE WILL CRUSH THEM. :)

Profile picture
jamestheron
 January 04, 2008, 04:16 AM

Thank you very much.

Profile picture
John
 January 04, 2008, 07:44 AM

You're welcome! I see another thing to fix: margins on unordered (bulleted) lists in the Conversations section...

Profile picture
phil
 January 04, 2008, 07:52 AM

John, Great, no problems with Bloglines-CPod links for a couple of days now. The only remaining problem (unless it is intended) is the 3rd set of screenshots I sent regarding the author, this is still happening. For example if I click on jamestheron's comment in Bloglines, he appears as the author in the CPod conversation in place of you.

Profile picture
John
 January 04, 2008, 09:57 AM

Phil, Hmmm... That will have to wait until next week then. We will do it. On the up-side, the bulleted list indent I mentioned above is already fixed! Whoo-hoo!

Profile picture
lostinasia
 January 04, 2008, 02:22 PM

Netvibes is working great - thanks! NetNewsWireLite is still odd; the names and links are all working (yay!), but there seems to be about eight or nine hours between updates, even when I manually update the feed (I don't have this issue for non-ChinesePod feeds). For example, John's "You're welcome!" post above, which was at Jan. 4 3:44PM my time (=Taiwan time = Shanghai time I think), is the most recent post that's come through NetNewsWireLite, and that's almost seven hours ago now. Plus, oddly, the news reader thinks the post came on January 5th at 6:44PM. One of those temporal distortions that show up in the ChinesePod universe...