The RSS Blog

Steve Rubel: BlogPulse has launched RSS alerts for blog searches. Taste a sample.

Randy: Feedster's got some competition.

Notes: The feeds from BlogPulse are invalid.

• The dates are of the incorrect format. They use ISO 8601 date times, but the RSS spec calls for RFC 822 date times. Many RSS readers compensate for this common fault, but it still should be fixed as it breaks many other readers.
• <ttl> appears twice, should appear once or not at all. Not many RSS readers even try to interprete <ttl>, but this could break some (very few) RSS readers that capture the <ttl> value using a SelectSingleNode or similar XPath query.
• <source> uses the href attribute. Very creative. I like it, but it's still invalid. You shouldn't extend RSS except thru namespace qualified elements. Also, url is a required attribute of <source>. The missing url attribute may break some RSS readers. BlogPulse might consider using url instead of href, which is still invalid, because url should point to an RSS file, not an HTML file. That said, I do this and it shouldn't break any RSS readers.

Update: I did a little looking around and BlogPulse has a lot of features that simply don't work. This isn't competition for Feedster, it's more like a compliment to Scott Johnson and his development team.

Update: This service is broken. The RSS views OK in a Web browser, but responds badly when you try to actually use the RSS. For instance, I get no <items>, when I use Web Sniffer.