RSS mistakes: let's not make them again

Re:RSS mistakes: let's not make them again by seanzieapples on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @02:44PM (#6059425)

I like your app so far but I input https://news.ycombinator.com/ and it's not able to locate an RSS feed (Just says "Loading"). I input https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and it works.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:RSS mistakes: let's not make them again by stephen_mcd on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @03:44PM (#6059804)

Ha!

Well as jerf mentioned below, HN doesn't correctly provide a link reference to its RSS feed. Now that's fine in our case, as a surprisingly large number of websites fail this test, and simply have a visible link with "rss" or "atom" in either the link's text or URL.

Now we pick these up, but in this case the front page of HN has an invalid link with "rss" in the text, namely this very thread itself. So normally the HN front page URL works fine, but right now it doesn't. This gives us a great chance to refine our discovery code a bit, so thank you!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:RSS mistakes: let's not make them again by malkarouri on Thursday July 18, 2013 @04:11AM (#6062420)

That is one of the coolest bugs I came across lately.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:RSS mistakes: let's not make them again by jerf on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @03:22PM (#6059647)

HN does not include the proper metadata to indicate an RSS feed. If

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" 
          title="Hacker News" 
          href="http://news.ycombinator.com/rss" />

was added to the <head> of the homepage, the discovery would probably work better.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:RSS mistakes: let's not make them again by stephen_mcd on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @03:39PM (#6059777)

Thank you! That's definitely a bug, looking into it :-)

[ Parent | on HN ]