Friday, August 25, 2006

RSS equals frustration

We are messing around with RSS feeds here at Eisenbrauns. We are trying to set them up for the various bookstore pages—ANE, Archaeology, Biblical Studies, etc. RSS is supposed to stand for "Really Simple Syndication." Right! Really simple to whom?

I now have 4 RSS readers running on my machine, trying to figure out what makes things tick. We have read the specs at W3 about mandatory tags, optional tags, etc. By our reckoning everything is supposed to be running right. But, it still doesn't seem to feed right. Frustrating. We have spent the better part of the last 3 days on it and intermittently before that for a few weeks.

Every one of the readers catches the feed at a different time. I even force an update and sometimes it catches it and sometimes it doesn't. We aren't sure if it is our database or if it is our firewall or if it is the readers. I tend to think it is at least partially the readers, since I also subscribed them to different feeds and the same things occur...

Update: 4:30 PM We think we found the problem. Seems a field in one of our databases wasn't getting updated correctly. We'll see on Monday! Hang on to your hats, it could get crazy :)

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