January 5, 2004
@ 04:26 PM

Last night I posted about bugs in RSS Bandit others have that aren't reproducible on my machine. Ted Leung was nice enough to post some details about the problems he had. So it turns out that RSS Bandit is at fault. The two primary ways of adding feeds to your subscription list have usability issues bugs.

  1. If you click the "New Feed" button and specify a feed URL without providing the URI scheme (e.g. enter www.example.org instead of http://www.example.org) then RSS Bandit assumes the URI is a local URI (i.e. file://www.example.org ) . Actually, it's worse sometimes it just throws an exception.

  2. The "Locate Feed" button that uses Mark Pilgrim's Ultra-liberal RSS autodiscovery algorithm to locate a feed for a site shows a weird error message if it couldn't make sense of the HTML because it was too malformed (i.e tag soup) tag soup.  There are a bunch of things I could change here from using a better error message to falling back to using Syndic8 to find the feed.

I'll fix both of these bugs before heading out to work today. Hopefully this should take care of the problems various people have had and probably never mentioned with adding feeds to RSS Bandit.