Dealing With Messed Up Feeds
Today at work I was reminded of
Tom's Hardware Guide. I figured that they had to have an
RSS feed somewhere and I was right. However, when I added it to my
aggregator I got an
Invalid character at line 8, column 227 error. I've never had an issue
adding any other feed to fofredux before. So I found this cool
Feed Validator to check
who was at fault, fofredux or the feed itself.
It turns out that the main feed on Tom's Hardware is not valid, which actually
surprises me as you can't get much more technical than the guys at Tom's
Hardware. I've E-mailed them to let them know but I don't know if it'll
actually get fixed. Still, I wanted to add it to my feeds before I forgot. To
do this I stumbled on
FeedBlendr which lets you merge multiple feeds into one. I
only put the feed for Tom's Hardware and it seems that FeedBlendr can handle
the malformed RSS just fine and presents me with a valid feed that I can
actually add successfully. It's like kind of a silly way to do things but
it works for now.
Back in the day Tom's used to be
the place to go for hardware info.
It's been literally years since I've read much of anything there. I hope they
are still just as useful.