March 13, 2004

Featureful

(Featureless)

Also, your direct links that I get from RSS are still broken. - adam

So I started digging through Movable Type's RSS template, the "Template Tags" section of the MT manual, and the MT forums. I discovered that MT was doing exactly what it was configured to do:

<description><$MTEntryExcerpt remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></description>

I decided I wanted my RSS v2 feed to be HTMLized, with the full post instead of an excerpt:

<description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$></description>

Bam. Done. MT rules. However, LiveJournal's feed-sucker is brain-dead and ignores the tag, instead believing that I just posted 9 new entries. Sigh.

Posted by blaine at 13:09 (-06:00)

Comments

I think LJ's RSS reader is limited by the fact that it has no way of uniquely identifying each item. Should it use the URL? The title? The text?

I'm not sure, but I think it actually uses the URL somehow as a unique identifier. I know when I changed the URL structure of all my entries it duplicated them all. It's crap, but offhand I can't think of a better way of identifying each entry, except by its title.

Posted by: Andy at 15 March 2004 09:41 (-06:00)

I'm not sure, but I think it actually uses the URL somehow as a unique identifier.

It must check something else, for my URLs changed not one bit. To the best of my knowledge, the only thing that changed was the "description" portion of my feed items. Perhaps there's an RFC, BCP, or similar document that specifies a common method of determining distinctness.

Posted by: blaine at 16 March 2004 01:10 (-06:00)

That's really strange. I know I've edited my journal entries several hours after they were first posted, and when LJ picks up the XML feed again, it's still under the same "entry" in the journal listing.

Wonder if it checks how much the description has changed...hmmm. Yeah, it would be really nice if LJ provided a more technical document on how its RSS reader works.

Posted by: Andy at 16 March 2004 12:25 (-06:00)

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