I hate RSS - well... not really but...

posted at 05:50:21
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Rants

RSS is brilliant, I can be kept up-to-date with a website's contents without having to go back and visit the site everyday on the off chance that's something's changed. It's just a shame that it's such a flipping bugger to implement.

Because it's based around XML, there are strict rules governing the scripts used to generate the content. One of these it appears is having to DIM (or "Dimention") all of the variables used.

Now about 15 years ago when I started to program in BASIC (on an old Amstrad with a whole 128kb of RAM - whoo!) you couldn't use a variable unless it had been DIM'd, now you very rarely have to do that (probably really bad programming I know but I'm lazy so

)

A lot of people have been whooping with delight to see their feedburner stats jump through the roof thanks to the inclusion of new Google Reader data so imagine my dismay when I logged into my feedburner dashboard to be presented with the following:

No feedreader subscribers

WTF

????

It appears that my RSS feed had all of a sudden decided to get "proper" on my bad-self and died the "Internal Server Error - 500" death.

Why?

Because I forgot to DIM "monthnow", "daynow", "counter" and "comments".

How flipping petty is that?

It had been working okay recently, and now I'm (apparently) left with no subscribers. So, if you were a subscriber and unsubscribed because the feed was broken, please think think about re-subscribing.... pretty please. That is if you happen to stop by here of course!

Plus, when I did DIM the UNDimmed whojits, it broke the main website - nice huh?

Sometimes I hate my job.

I'm off to lie in a dark corner now, morning the loss of my 91 subscribers and moaning that no-one cares that I have man-flu