In the process of setting up Novedge Pulse I had to go through several hundreds RSS feeds from blogs and news sources. More interestingly, I had to build a software system able to understand all of them. My first approach to the problem was very naive. I assumed that RSS was a simple and well defined standard based on XML and therefore there would be no space for syntactical error or personal interpretations.
Not having any RSS feed at all. This is by far the most common problem.
I was wrong. While most of the RSS feeds are aligned with the standard definition (there are several versions), I found a large number of feeds that are almost unusable.
Here are some of the most severe errors:
Less serious mistakes that can still compromise the fruition of your feeds:
… following an interesting link just to find out that you have to register on a totally irrelevant website
Many of these problems can be fixed in no time by a programmer or by spending a few minutes setting the parameters of your RSS generators. A free, easy test for syntactical correctness of the feed can be done on several websites. I recommend FeedsValidator. Also having your feeds hosted by FeedBurner can take care of several problems.
Franco Folini