RSS Feed question.

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SyBorg
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RSS Feed question.

Post by SyBorg » Thu May 18, 2006 9:29 am

I've added the RSS feed for RouterTech rss.php to my Google home page. What I'm often seeing is duplicate listings for the same topic as per the below image (I'm using ImageShackas suggested by Kieran due to current upload issue)

Image

I thought initially that this was due to the post being moved and a 'shadow' topic being left behind but I think now it is a little bit more.
Taking the image as an example:
There are two links to the RouterTech Firmware, but then there are two separate topics on it, one in Firmware and one in Releases. This is understandable if a bit confusing :wink:

There are two links to the 'Can't upload attachments' topic and these appear to be for the last two posts. The topmost of the two is viewtopic.php?p=4789#4789 and the bottom one viewtopic.php?p=4760#4760

For the topmost and last links in the image, they both relate to the Music ripping tools topic but the topmost is the most recent post (at this time) viewtopic.php?p=4802#4802
and the one at the bottom is for the 6th to last post viewtopic.php?p=4744#4744!
Is this really how it should behave or is Google wrong here? I would have expected one link to be supplied to the most recent post in a given topic, not one per post (in a non consistant manner). :?
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Post by Neo » Thu May 18, 2006 1:48 pm

I don't know how Google is supposed to work, but I'm seeing the same as you SyBorg :)/:(

Perhaps that's how Google is interpreting the feed, since the feeds from different websites seem to each have their own structures/tags. The RouterTech feed refers to http://backend.userland.com/rss. It may be worth looking at other feeds in Google to see how they compare ;). Of course, the RouterTech RSS ticker is always available (to Windows users) :)
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Post by neilius » Thu May 18, 2006 4:14 pm

I think it may be creating a link to a topic every time a user posts to it, hence multiple links for topics?

Regards,

Neil.
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Post by SyBorg » Thu May 18, 2006 4:21 pm

neilius wrote:I think it may be creating a link to a topic every time a user posts to it, hence multiple links for topics?

Regards,

Neil.
This was my thought
me wrote:I would have expected one link to be supplied to the most recent post in a given topic, not one per post (in a non consistant manner)
but it appears to miss a few out, and does not order them as expected. Given the number of jokes that Jim has posted today you would then expect the entire list to be links to little bits of Shotokan101 humour :D
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Post by Kieran » Thu May 18, 2006 4:50 pm

If you view the feed with your eyes, you can quite clearly see (although admittedly in code), that things are not being duplicated: rss.php I blame the newsreader (Incidentally, FF is fine with it)
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Post by Steve » Thu May 18, 2006 5:05 pm

are the notifications being cached in some way with TTL keeping them showing even when the next post is made? This is as you can probably tell a real shot in the dark.

can confirm FF is fine with it and always has been. i don't use it (the feed that is) as whenever I'm onlive, i have a tab open and check back when I can.
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Post by SyBorg » Thu May 18, 2006 8:32 pm

As long as we're happy that the feed is fine (which I was fairly confident would be the case) then feel free to lock this. I guess I'm just surprised that the new computer age Badboy that is Google is not treating it correctly :shock:
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Post by Kieran » Thu May 18, 2006 9:00 pm

RSS is not as strictly defined as HTML, and indeed there are regognised grey areas with its implementation in a few places. While it is possible to validate feeds (and ours does to a standard), different versions are not interoperable with a "one version" reader, and so I would postulate that the errors on Google are due to the expected version of RSS feed that google is set to look for, compared with what the RT feed actually is.

As pointed out though, the fact that the code and functionality in firefox is working ok means it's not a forum issue. Feel free to continue discussion on the finer points of RSS feeds in Free Chat (Technical) if you wish. Locked.
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