Site bits

20 Nov 2004 · #misc

The RSS feed for the blog is RSS 2.0 now. Most notable changes are the addition of comment URL, publishing date and category information for each item. I am a little confused about the date bit though. I am pretty sure I am reading RFC 822 correctly. It says the time can be specified as the local time along with the offset from GMT as (+/-)HHMM. So for Singapore that would mean an offset of +0800 which is what I’ve set in my feed for the pubDate element. For some reason unknown to me, Bloglines is reading the time as [time in GMT] [offset from GMT].

So my question is: what’s the right thing to do according to RFC822? [localtime] [offset] or [time in GMT] [offset]? How are other feed readers treating my pubDates?

Reading RFCs is such a bitch.

Speaking of Bloglines, it seems to have a really old cached copy of my atom feed. What’s up with that? Anyway, I suggest you ditch my atom feed and subscribe to the rss version. I have no intention to keep patching both of them and plan to eventually feed the atoms to a hungry enzyme I keep in my basement for exactly such occasions.

Oh, there’s also a new BookShelf thing. Not in the feed, of course.