Common RSS Programming Mistakes

Scott Johnson has a great podcast/blog post on common RSS mistakes:

1. Putting session IDs into feed urls
2. Not validating your feed. Valid XML really, really matters. http://www.feedvalidator.org/.
3. Too many feeds.
4. Making it too hard to find the feed. There’s a standard logo. Use it. Link to it from every page.
5. Getting auto discovery wrong / not supporting auto discovery at all. Even today this happens all the time.
6. Not offering full content feeds.
7. Improper encoding of data. See point #2. (This happens even with “major” sites — I saw it today from Digg.com’s feed.
8. Not testing in multiple aggregators.
9. Trying to track the exit path of links.
10. Not testing specifically on the hell that is MS-Word data. “SmartQuotes” which I think are the devils handiwork in particular.
11. The feed:// psuedo protocol. Oy.
12. Placing XML purity over the care of the user.

As someone who has mostly consumed feeds I’d say that #4, #6 and #11 are the items that have bothered me the most. Especially #11, I’m tired of having to correct cut-n-pasted links out of WordPress blogs that still have the feed:// included in their feed URL.