Now With More Atom-y Goodness
Posted at 10:51 PM
How long has Atom actually been a standard? I forget. Jess would know. She’s handy that way at the office. Anyway, I finally updated my Atom feed from crusty version 0.3 to the IETF-sanctioned 1.0 format.
After making the required and silly little tag name changes, I tested my feed with the validator and a few feed readers laying around on my Mac and available on the web. It validated just fine but it seems that some Atom parsers, with the exception of our framework in Safari, can’t figure out a standard date and time with a time zone offset.
NetNewsWire Lite handles the dates and times in my RSS feed just fine but completely drops the time zone offset from those in my Atom feed, moving the time stamps back by seven or eight hours depending on daylight saving time.
Bloglines and Google Reader do better but make odd and different errors due to some of my posts being in standard time and some in daylight saving time.
I’m coming to realize that using anything other than UTC in a weblog is often going to appear wrong in many feed readers. What a pity. At least using Zulu time would complement my interest in aviation.
There’s a reason Safari works so well. I pretty much demanded it using my own blog as the poster child for just this kind of weird time stamp issue. And I can do that since I’m the boss. Just another abuse of power, I suppose.
Also, it appears I exaggerated about the whole “blogging again” thing.
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