Fixing Xanga’s Broken RSS Feeds
Monday, July 12th, 2004I finally decided to break down and make use of RSS feeds through an RSS aggregator instead of just reading everything through my LiveJournal friends page. I picked NetNewsWire by Ranchero Software as my client of choice. Unfortunately, when I tried to add the feeds for some people I read on Xanga, nothing would show up. A little bit of googling led me to discover that the problem is due to the fact that Xanga’s feeds don’t validate as proper RSS feeds. They erroneously close the channel tag off after the closing link tag (which is near the beginning) instead of before the closing rss tag (which is at the very end). Rather then letting this problem prevent me from reading Xanga journals through NetNewsWire, I wrote a small Perl script to fix the problem.