Bad CB-CB, BAD!

I've known my RSS feed has been screwed up for quite some time... but no one has ever complained so I didn't feel compelled to fix it. Well, Cry Baby Chris B. (let's call him CB-CB for short, pronounced "seeb-seeb") broke my nearly 2 year lazy streak... he complained about it today. So, I fixed it.

There were two problems, the first was the encoding... I use Word to write these posts which encodes the text in Windows-1252, but my RSS feed was reporting the encoding as iso-8859-1. So, anytime Word did something fancy with my punctuation (like quotes or apostrophes) the aggregators wouldn't know what the heck kind of character it was, so they'd plop in a square instead. Now that the feed is reporting the correct encoding, there should be no more screwed up punctuation.

The other problem was the issue of formatting... for that, I lovingly ripped off the template from this site. I hacked out the trackback and comment code, but otherwise it's a direct copy (with the correct Windows-1252 encoding, of course).

I've added the XML button back to my site (I removed it when I first set up the site, back when I had no idea what RSS was, or why I wanted it). Here's the only catch for you subscribers out there... to get the nicely formatted feed, you need to use the RSS 2.0 feed which is at http://lessthanme.com/index.xml and NOT the RSS 1.0 feed which is at http://lessthanme.com/index.rdf. I'll leave the .rdf file up for a while, but eventually I'm going to remove it, so update your aggregators!

If you had no idea what this post was about... then... well... umm.... go here and read this. Peter introduced me to aggregators back in the day, so let him introduce them to you too! (Yay, the laziness is back!)