RSS News Feed Errors

Anonymous
Topic 13273

Quote:

"welcome" news item's date always changes to current date, so when viewed in a "sort by date" list, it's always near the "newest" end of the list, this only happens at einstein, no other projects

(there are other errors affecting all projects, but they're being addressed at SETI)

I don't know what might be causing this problem. I don't have a tool for viewing RSS feeds, so I can't reproduce this. But I'll try and install an RSS viewer to see this for myself.

Cheers,
Bruce

Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen
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RSS News Feed Errors

I just installed a basic RSS reader on my laptop and saw a number of different problems with the RSS pages. I think I have now fixed these. I would be very grateful if you and other RSS-savvy volunteers could poke around the RSS pages and see if everything now looks OK. If not, let me know and I'll continue to try and fix it.

Cheers,
Bruce

Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen
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RE: I've had a poke around,

Quote:
I've had a poke around, and i can only assume that the cause of the welcome entry always changing date is due to incorrect s (but that's not your fault, it's not implemented correctly on all projects that have upgraded recently), but i'm hoping that these issues will be resolved in the CVS

I changed this to one which I think is valid (at least according to the feed validator it is). Please tell me if you still think there is something wrong with this. Be sure to reload your browser or RSS feed tool.

Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen
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RE: the "welcome" item has

Quote:

the "welcome" item has disapeared all together, not that i mind, i don't know if it's intentional, just thought i'd state my observations

I'll post here again when a new item is added with what happened

Yes, I got rid of the welcome from the news feed. It was only put there as a simple way to get it onto the front page.

The GUID were but I've now changed them to "true" ones. Is this better?
I'll post another news item in the next few days to see if things then work better for you.

Bruce

Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen
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Credit: 170,849,008
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RE: RE: RE: the

Quote:
Quote:
Quote:

the "welcome" item has disapeared all together, not that i mind, i don't know if it's intentional, just thought i'd state my observations

I'll post here again when a new item is added with what happened

Yes, I got rid of the welcome from the news feed. It was only put there as a simple way to get it onto the front page.

The GUID were but I've now changed them to "true" ones. Is this better?
I'll post another news item in the next few days to see if things then work better for you.

Bruce


had a look at the feed, and yes, looks perfect :)
I wasn't actually expecting permalinks to be used, just proper s, but it's great that you have, and the numbering scheme looks like it'll work properly now :)

thanks bruce

Lee, unless you post again to this thread I will assume that all is now OK with the RSS feed. Since I don't use RSS feeds, I would appreciate it if you raise a fuss in the future if you spot anything amiss.

Bruce

Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen
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RE: Oh, another

Quote:

Oh, another thing...

feeds should be served as applicatin/xml (at least, if not their content-specific type such as application/rss+xml for RSS)

rather than text/xml

the difference is that application/xml means that it needs to be processed/parsed before it's meaningful, and before it should be displayed to the user (which is correct for feeds)

text/xml means that it's ok as it is (which isn't true of most cases where xml is used)

text/xml will work, but application/xml is the correct type to use

Fixed, please confirm.

Bruce

Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen
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Credit: 170,849,008
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RE: to correct this

Quote:
to correct this behaviour, the last-modified value needs to remain constant untill such the feed is changed (new item, or an existing item is updated, or any other change really), when it is changed, it should be replaced with the date/time that the feed was modified (so clients redownload it)

The fundamental problem is that the page (I assume the relevant page is rss_main.php, right?) is being generated dynamically by a .php script, so it's not static. It may be possible to fix this using the BOINC page caching mechanism -- I'll check.

Cheers,
Bruce

Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen
Joined: 15 Oct 04
Posts: 958
Credit: 170,849,008
RAC: 0

RE: if i may be so bold,

Quote:
if i may be so bold, i've got another suggestion which will help both yourselves and users with bandwidth and performance related to the feed (but this could be applied to other php pages too)

I've fixed the last-modified values and . Please confirm, and I'll check my changes into BOINC CVS.

Cheers,
Bruce

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