rss borked

bob bobberson

Tried to get an rss go this instead

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This page contains the following errors:

error on line 15 at column 57: EntityRef: expecting ';'
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

Penny Arcade TV: Extra Credits http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/extra-credits Show Fucker 6000 en-us Copyright (c) 1998-2011 Penny Arcade, Inc. 2011-10-05T07:01:34+00:00 http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/so-you-want-to-be-a-producer This week, we take a close look at one of the game industry's less-appreciated roles: the Producer. Come discuss the topic with us in the forums!

talideon

Here's what the Feed Validator says about the feed: http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http://penny-arcade.com/feed/show/extra-credits

The fixes aren't difficult: the dates need to be formatted in the correct format, the description elements need to be either entity encoded or wrapped in CDATA directives, both of which are easy fixes.

One other change that ought to be made is that the guid element contains bad information: it should be globally unique, not just unique within the feed. The best fix would be to take the URL that's currently being used to populate the link element in each feed entry, put that in the guid elements, add the attribute isPermaLink="true" to the guid, and remove the link element entirely.

Basically, rather than this:

<item>
  <link>
    http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/games-you-might-not-have-tried-2
  </link>
  <title><![CDATA[Extra Credits Season 3, Ep. 10: Games You Might Not Have Tried #2]]></title>
  <description>This week, we list off some more interesting games you might never have heard of (or gotten around to trying).<br />
Come discuss the topic with us in the forums!<br />
<a href="http://extracurricular.tk/forum/viewtopic.php?&amp;t=528">http://extracurricular.tk/forum/viewtopic.php?&amp;t=528</a>
</description>
  <pubDate>2011-09-28T07:01:55+00:00</pubDate>
  <guid>/patv/episode/games-you-might-not-have-tried-2</guid>
</item>

You'd have this:

<item>
  <guid isPermaLink="true">
    http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/games-you-might-not-have-tried-2
  </guid>
  <title><![CDATA[Extra Credits Season 3, Ep. 10: Games You Might Not Have Tried #2]]></title>
  <description><![CDATA[
This week, we list off some more interesting games you might never have heard of (or gotten around to trying).<br />
Come discuss the topic with us in the forums!<br />
<a href="http://extracurricular.tk/forum/viewtopic.php?&amp;t=528">http://extracurricular.tk/forum/viewtopic.php?&amp;t=528</a>
]]></description>
  <pubDate>Wed, 28 Sep 2011 07:01:55 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

The lastBuildDate element in the feed metadata would have to have its format fixed similarly to the pubDate element in the example above.

talideon

I checked, and the feed for the PA comic has similar issues, but oddly, the contents of the description element is being wrapped in a CDATA directive properly. This may then be a site-wide issue with the RSS generation code, and not just isolated to the video section of the site.