Tag Archives: RSS

November 14, 2008 | Blogosphere, Media, Web design

News sites moving to full-text RSS

I just noticed something going through my blog reader: The Gazette’s upgraded blogging engine is now putting out full-text feeds.

It’s a trend (unfortunately too slow) of media outlets desperate for online attention giving their stuff away for free. Looking at other news media blogs, I notice that the majority now are full-text feeds.

Here’s the breakdown:

Full-text feeds

The Gazette/Canada.com (CommunityServer)
Canoe (b2evolution)
Maclean’s (WordPress)
L’Actualité (WordPress)
Toronto Star (TypePad)
Le Devoir (ExpressionEngine)

Computer-generated excerpts that cut off midsentence

Branchez-Vous (MovableType)
Voir (CommunityServer)
Globe and Mail (Internal CMS via FeedBurner)

Manual excerpt (written by the post author), or title-only when none is written

Radio-Canada (I have some issues with RadCan’s blog software, which I’m guessing is custom-built)

Mixed

Cyberpresse(WordPress)
- Excerpts include Patrick Lagacé, Richard Therrien and Richard Hétu
- Full-text include Le blogue de l’édito

June 11, 2008 | Media, Web design

Le Devoir works its feeds

Le Devoir, whose RSS feed I had to unsubscribe to a while back because it was a monolithic feed that had 60 articles a day, has overhauled their feed system and now offers multiple feeds. Not only do they have feeds for different sections (their media news feed has a welcome new home back in my feed reader), but they have feeds for individual journalists, which is something I’d like to see other websites copy.

The next step will be having feeds for each individual keyword (they’ve been tagging articles with keywords for quite a while now, but haven’t done anything useful with it online yet)

August 24, 2007 | Blogosphere, Media, Web design

TQS needs to learn web programming

I just tried to subscribe to the one blog on TQS’s website, that of Jean-Michel Vanasse. Unfortunately, I can’t, because the RSS feed for his blog is malformed.

It looks like the problem is with their advertising system. They’re adding ads as items within the feed (bound to annoy some people, but something we could live with). Unfortunately, they’re not escaping the ampersands (&), which is causing problems for any feed reader expecting valid XML.

Odd that they would not have noticed this. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll take them to fix it?

UPDATE: If you guessed “four days”, give yourself a cookie.