RSS and XHTML

I know at least 2 people read my humble little blog via RSS, and I also know that the code that handles RSS on my blog is utter shite. So I decided it was about time to fix it.

In fact, after the modifications I made to the blog script on the last update, the RSS got completely destroyed. It's a good job I noticed really.

I did some work to find out a little bit more about RSS, and then set to work fixing the bug with the formatting. Anyone who reads this via RSS will have noticed that everything appears on one line, with no gaps between blocks of differently formatted text, making it rather unpleasant to read.

Not anymore. The formatting is now on par with what appears on the website. Paragraphs appear as paragraphs, blocks of differently formatted text have space between them.

While playing with RSS I came across another RSS toy: This time it's for Firefox. It's called Sage and it isn't a bad little aggregator. I'm still a big advocate of Bloglines though.

As well as fixing RSS, I've also modified some of the code that parses the blogs into HTML to try and make it a little more XHTML compliant. There are issues because this code was designed for HTML-4.01 Transitional, not XHTML-1.0 Strict. That's why the page often does not validate on the W3C Validator (if you've tried). It will do eventually, as soon as I find the time and energy.

Oh and another thing, not that it affects any of you lot, but I've also added some extra features to the new blog page which make my life considerably easier. Now I can preview my writing before making it live, and I can also save it as a draft and reload it at a later date. Very handy.

My reason for all this work? At some point I'd like to release the script as open-source freeware. I say "at some point" because at the moment I'd be embarassed to let anyone see the code as it's a bit of a mess; although it is getting better with each of these updates.

Anyway, enjoy the RSS. If you're using one of those inferior browsers that doesn't autodiscover RSS feeds in the page, then the link is http://nic-nac-project.de/~lowey/cgi-bin/blog.cgi?mode=rss