It’s just data

Category Domains considered harmful?

I've been trying for days to subscribe to Ted Leung's RSS feed using Radio's aggregator. What I have been getting is:

Can't subscribe to the channel. The most likely cure is to check the URL in a web browser and see if you can get it to read the feed. The following message probably won't help you figure out what went wrong, but we include it here because it might. "Assignment over existing table object "s" is not allowed. Delete the object first, or use table.assign to override protection."

After some experimentation, I tracked the problem down to the lines of the following form:

<category domain="http://www.sauria.com"> culture/film </category>

Delete the domain, and Radio is happy. Yet, as near as I can tell, these elements conform to the RSS 2.0 specification, hence the feed validates.


Sam, it conforms to the specification, and Radio should not barf on them. I made a change to my copy of compileService and it correctly processes this feed. I'm going to let it burn in for a few hours to be sure I didn't break anything else. Thanks for the report.

Posted by Dave Winer at

Category issues in Radio?

Sam Ruby finds possible RSS2.0 <category> implementation issues in Radio. Has anyone else seen...

Excerpt from Ben Hammersley.com at

Pingback from Workbench: Thursday, January 16, 2003

at

I released the change. Seems to work just fine. Thanks for the report Sam.

Posted by Dave Winer at

OK, let's give it a spin. Right click on the Radio icon in the task bar. Select Update Radio.root. Looks like one part got updated. Not sure this is required, but let's close down radio and reopen it to be sure... done. OK, now to subscribe Ted:

Congratulations, you have successfully subscribed to the "Ted Leung on the air" feed. It now appears in your subscriptions list below; new items will appear on the News page every hour.

That was like, what, six hour turnaround from problem report to deployed and tested fix? Sweeeeet!

Posted by Sam Ruby at

You didn't need to restart. ;->

Posted by Dave Winer at

BottomFeeder - http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/BottomFeeder - picked up the feed right off. IT's been quite awhile since we stumbled on a feed we couldn't handle

Posted by James Robertson at

Already causing trouble

Sam says that my RSS feed is breaking Radio's aggregator because of my use of category domains. I did run the RSS files through the RSS validator before I turned on the blog. Glad to see that Dave Winer is going to fix Radio. Sam -- feel free to...

Excerpt from Ted Leung on the air at

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