I’ve been reading Rob Fahrni’s weblog via his RSS feed. Since I’m using AmphetaDesk as my RSS reader — actually my modified AmphetaMailer — I recently noticed a problem with the validity of his RSS feed. In this case it was a simple matter of some unencoded characters. (AmphetaDesk in its current release is appropriately picky about RSS feeds being valid XML.)
Along with a guess at Rob’s movie line of the week, I mentioned the RSS problem I found. I’ve done this several times in the past with different sites and have usually found the site author to be receptive to the feedback. In this case, Rob was glad to hear about it — he’s even given me a link from his site. Cool.
What I’d really like to do is put together an “RSS checker” service that would check your RSS feed and e-mail you if it found any problems. This could be set up as a simple server process with e-mail interfaces. For web authors who care to make sure their outgoing feeds are valid, this might be a handy service.
Rob also asked:
I also found that he works for Palm, double excellent! So Brian which device do you use and do you moblog with it?
Right now I’m using the Tungsten T as my daily device. I’m not using it to moblog or post to my website, but I’d like to. I’ve got another side project envisioned that would be helpful for mobile blogging.