I’ve been meaning to upgrade to apache2 for a while now. So I set about doing it yesterday as it was the only legacy app I had left on the debian testing box I run this blog from. The wordpress installation I use to run peapodpy.org migrated with minimal fuss. The mambo installation I was using for hlynes.com just died. No amount of prodding would convince it to come back.

I’ve been getting more irritated with mambo as time passes anyway so I decided to see if there was an easy way to migrate my blog to wordpress. Lo and behold mambo2wordpress does the job. Now all I have to do is figure out why the RSS feed is setting pubDate to 01 Jan 1970 for everything.

*Update*
Looks like it’s only the imported articles that have wrong pubDates. So hopefully as new entries go on RSS aggregators should be able to sort things out. Probably a formatting thing with the old articles that the RSS creator in WordPress is objecting to.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the default RSS feed generator in Mambo doesn't support HTML. Madness!

Anyway having upgraded to RSSXT
I now have lovely RSS feeds. I'm trying hard not think about the
chocolate-teapotishness of an RSS feed from a CMS not doing HTML.

On the subject of RSS feeds here are some things that annoy me:

Not setting PubDate.
Adverts (seriously, just don't.)
Advertising Last-Modified or ETag in your HTTP headers but not sending
back 304 when they are used as part of the page request. Yes Liberated Syndication, I'm looking at you.

Continue reading Adventure in RSS →