Does The Pope have a Time Machine??
Cooo, while trawling through loads of feeds today, building this system for podcasters, I was wondering why I was getting some strange results. I thought it was my code playing tricks with me, but no.
Now this is just one of the MANY MANY errors and quirks I find in people’s RSS feeds (which will be the subject of a future podcast), but it appears that the Vatican Radio One-O Five ‘Live’ podcast (among others) is being ‘future posted’. Notice the date on the most recent item? It’s in the THE FUTURE!
This could be an error in whatever time-travelling software the Pope uses for his podcasts, but I also find it very odd that this is a FeedBurner feed, and should have been ‘sanitized’ to a point. You’d think they would, wouldn’t you?
I am absolutely flabbergasted at the variations of RSS feeds out there, which people are relying on to get their voices heard on podcasts. All that effort to produce a show. We really need to help educate people on syndication feed practices. This isn’t a web site HTML page, which might show up and work in various browsers, even if the code is invalid, this is MACHINE-READABLE-CODE and should be written by machines/scripts that all speak the SAME language, or we’ll find ourselves in a right pickle.
Soon, we will be able to throw open the doors to podcast.com and see if we can collate some good, solid information, to go alongside the RSS 2.0 spec which can help people get it right. All that along with some podcast ‘grazing’ pages which we think you’re going to love 😉 We do!
It’s worth it. Trust me 🙂
ps: Still on a religious note, I have also noticed that the RSS feed for the alt.muslim.review podcast is in chronological order. RSS feeds should be in REVERSE chronological order. Now, this could be a mistake (which it is, really) or it could have something to do with the reverse order that pages and text go in Arabic (and other) languages. Hmm.. Interesting. I wonder if that’s it. If so, then all Arabic content syndication systems might need to give that some thought.