GoneWacko’s Blog

Firefox Live Bookmarks

February 5, 2008 on 9:13 pm | In Life |

Although it’s most probably a well known issue with Firefox 2, I felt like writing about something, and I chose this.

As most readers of this blog are no doubt aware, Planet TT-Forums is a so called feed aggregator, which collects the RSS/Atom feeds of a number of members of TT-Forums.

I’ve subscribed to Planet TT-Forums’ own RSS feed through Firefox Live Bookmarks. This works pretty well and most RSS feeds are not an issue. However, there are a few that do cause problems.

For example, Jonty Sewell’s Blog seems to be resulting in RSS feeds that get parsed incorrectly by Firefox’s Live Bookmarks:
<title>Jonty: iPod accessories? Yay!</title>
<guid>http://www.jontysewell.co.uk/42 at http://www.jontysewell.co.uk</guid>
<link>http://www.jontysewell.co.uk/blog/ipod-accessories%3F-yay%21</link>

For some inexplicable reason, the URL used when clicking on the live bookmark entry, is between the <guid> tags instead of the <link> tags.
I’ve experienced other-but-similar quirks with Richard Eldred’s Blog’s blog.

It’s as if the Live Bookmarks feature doesn’t actually parse the XML, it just takes whatever line seems to contain a URL and uses that.

Interestingly, the ‘Feed preview’ page - for lack of a better name - does parse things correctly. Why they would use different feed parsing code for different parts of the same application is beyond me.

I’m going to see if the Atom feed for Planet TT-Forums performs better…

Update: Indeed, the Atom feed works just fine, at least with the entry for Jonty’s blog. In the case of the Atom feed, the actual link comes before any other entry that has a URL in it. That might be why, or perhaps the Atom parser is just not as mentally retarded.