Hacker News's RSS feed is broken again | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News's RSS feed is broken again

10 pointsinklesspen8 comments

The comments link used to be readable, but now it's just in a CDATA free-floating within the <item> tag. Neither Firefox nor NetNewsWire show the comments link this way, and the feed does not validate (http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Frss)

In addition, I'd be really happy if you could add a GUID (or other universal identifier) to each element in the feed; that way when the title of the post gets edited five times, NetNewsWire won't think it's a new item every time.

I really would suggest looking into using Atom instead of RSS, because it's simpler to just have one specific standard, instead of trying to meet one of the nine different RSS standards, but I can understand that this is a little more unlikely to happen.

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Agreed.

The comments link needs to go inside a <description> element, and a GUID could be as simple the HN item URL.

I've been loving reading Hacker News via Google Reader since the comments link started showing up. It was a downer to see it gone today.

Can anyone tell me anything more precise than "it doesn't work?" What is the difference between the current format of the RSS feed and what it should be?

I don't use news.yc RSS so I can't speak to the problems, but here's a possibly-too-precise answer:

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.yco...

Ok, I think I figured out what changed. Is it working now?

Yep, the comments links are back in Google Reader. Thanks!

While this is good enough for me, if you'd really like to know the diff between the current feed and the "ideal" feed that works in the maximum number of clients, http://feedvalidator.org is a great resource.

Yep, the comment link was fixed a week or two ago, now it seems broken again.

While we're on the subject, is it possible for HN to add the time correctly? I always get this in my RSS feed (look to the right): http://i32.tinypic.com/j0bgyc.png

Hmmm, what is the order that you get in the rss? Feeds are supposed to be time-ordered, but here they appear in the current ranking on the homepage. So the historical ordering is not very useful...

shameless plug:

We've culled Ask YC threads from Hacker News and gave them their own page and RSS feed.

http://searchyc.com/askyc/ http://searchyc.com/askyc/rss

If you like the aspect of community knowledge sharing check the link out.

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