SOTT RSS bug

[aimarok]

Sometimes SOTT RSS feed contains lines of special characters like this one:
</p>
My feed reader (Slick RSS in Chrome) cannot wrap such lines and expand layout horizontally which is very inconvenient. Please create a filter to delete such lines from feed content. Thank you.

 

[Vulcan59]

Hi aimarok,

Not too sure if the problems is at our end. This particular issue has been reported before and a solution discussed here. :)

 

[Scottie]

Well, that is actually doubly weird, because:
1. SOTT articles do not use <p> tags, which is what you are seeing, escaped several times
2. all HTML tags are stripped when the RSS feed is generated anyway, so they're should be any <p> tags in there even if they did somehow slip by

So, the only thing I can suggest is posting back here with a specific article that has this problem in the RSS feed, and we'll see if anybody else sees the same thing.

At least that way, we can check to make sure there isn't a bug on our end.

 

[aimarok]

Well I should really have posted whole RSS message instead of this weird string. If this bug happens again I'll post whole XML document. I only remember that this string was between sentences in item's description.

 

[aimarok]

Here is a piece of today's RSS feed:

<item>
<title>
Chevron's Largest California Refinery "Immediate-Extreme-Health-Hazard" Fire Emergency
</title>
<link>
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/249277-Chevron-s-Largest-California-Refinery-Immediate-Extreme-Health-Hazard-Fire-Emergency
</link>
<description>
&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/div&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;
</description>
<guid>
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/249277-Chevron-s-Largest-California-Refinery-Immediate-Extreme-Health-Hazard-Fire-Emergency
</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 Aug 2012 22:17:24 -0500</pubDate>
</item>

 

[Scottie]

Aha, that did it.

Should be fixed now.

 

[aimarok]

Thanks :D

 

[Divide by Zero]

Not sure if this is a bug or intended.

When I tried using the RSS feed using multiple programs, when downloading the article, sometimes it would not have the whole article (as some sott focus, etc are long articles).

I'm not sure if there is a limit on your end, but it would be nice to use RSS to read the articles as I have an older smartphone and usually am in an area that has slow internet!

 

[Scottie]

When I tried using the RSS feed using multiple programs, when downloading the article, sometimes it would not have the whole article (as some sott focus, etc are long articles).

The RSS feeds have only the article summary, and not the whole article. Or do you mean if you click the article link, the whole thing doesn't show up?

 

[Divide by Zero]

The RSS reader downloads the whole stream, takes a bit of time...
Then I see the summaries, which I expect to be short. But, when I click an article, it sometimes doesn't show the full article.

Perhaps the clients I have tried don't allow long articles? What RSS reader do you recommend?

 

[Scottie]

Well, all the RSS readers I've ever read just read the RSS feed (XML file). To view the articles, you need a browser.

If you click a link in the RSS feed, it's just a link to the article itself, which is not XML but HTML, and therefore will probably not display properly in the RSS reader.

I guess it depends on the RSS reader and if i has an actual web browser built in. Or, maybe it depends on whether or not the RSS reader has a "take this HTML page and turn it into a simpler page for display in the RSS reader" feature, and whether or not that feature works well!

 

[Kaigen]

I have another use with the RSS.
If I check the SOTT RSS I read all new articles and then in some few hours or half day I have again new articles and again the old ones I already have read before. Sometimes when I did not check for two days I have 200 or so SOTT articles and it is difficult to find out which are new and which are repeated again.
Have someone els this?
I must mention that the German SOTT is working well I don't get any doubles again.

 

[Sirius]

I have another use with the RSS.
If I check the SOTT RSS I read all new articles and then in some few hours or half day I have again new articles and again the old ones I already have read before. Sometimes when I did not check for two days I have 200 or so SOTT articles and it is difficult to find out which are new and which are repeated again.
Have someone els this?

I observed something like that a few times. There were already read articles refetched again which shouldn't be. I don't know but it doesn't happen often, so I didn't consider it to be that annoying.

What RSS reader do you recommend?

Which operating system? NetNewsWire for Mac OS X. Don't know Windows about readers.

One thing (which probably isn't trivial to fix) is that if you subscribe to SMF's feed(s), i.e. ‘the forum’, no author is displayed and assigned to the entries. Thus you don't know who actually wrote a post. You can only read the posts in sequence but without any author information.
Are you aware of this issue?

 

[Aliana]

I am using Bamboo feed reader in Firefox and suddenly it decided not to load from the Forum. Sott feeds are fine. Did something change recently? I keep getting an error message that says XML parsing error: not well formed.

Worked just fine until an hour or so..

 

[Scottie]

I am using Bamboo feed reader in Firefox and suddenly it decided not to load from the Forum. Sott feeds are fine. Did something change recently? I keep getting an error message that says XML parsing error: not well formed.

Worked just fine until an hour or so..

Seems to be working okay for me right now.