Buggy RSS feeds at Digg
I just noticed a strange bug with Digg's RSS feeds: when you subscribe to a feed for a search term (to monitor submissions of your blog posts, for example), sometimes the feed will be invalid because it is missing closing </channel> and </rss> tags. This means that the feed won't be parsed by most readers, and you won't get updates of any new items in the feed.
The weird part is that this doesn't happen for all search terms. I found that the chris, efinke, and charles feeds are all malformed, but the feeds for apple, kevin, and rose are not. My best guess as to the cause is that some item in each of the malformed feeds is causing the code that generates the feed to die prematurely, leaving the feed incomplete. At any rate, I've reported the bug to Digg, and it will be interesting to see how long it takes to get fixed.



Christopher Finke is a software engineer at Mahalo. He is available for birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. 


April 23rd, 2007 at 8:33 pm
[...] of Digg’s broken search RSS feeds: still [...]
April 27th, 2007 at 11:01 am
[...] been a week since I first brought up the problem with certain Digg Search RSS feeds being broken. I reported the bug through [...]
May 19th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
[...] other Digg news, this bug I filed regarding Digg’s broken search RSS feeds 4 weeks ago has still not been addressed. Methinks [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:21 am
[...] I’m leaning towards #2, but I don’t know how they would track submissions from my site since the only way to do that has been broken for months. [...]
June 20th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
[...] other Digg news, the fatal flaw with some Digg RSS feeds that I first mentioned here exactly 2 months ago still has not been fixed. I had gotten my hopes up since Digg was down for [...]
June 20th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
[...] other Digg news, the fatal flaw with some Digg RSS feeds that I first mentioned here exactly 2 months ago still has not been fixed. I had gotten my hopes up since Digg was down for [...]
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:36 pm
[...] finally fixed the bug I reported and wrote about here 3 months ago. When you consider that my feed reader checks for new items every 15 minutes, 10 hours [...]