I'll be there, Kevin, and I'll be blogging! Hope I'll see you there..

Sigh. A great resource that's impaired by a lousy feed.

Is there any chance that you'd be in a position to fix the RSS feed, Kevin?

The feed works like a champ for me, Jeff. I've received 191 posts over the past three days via the feed...much more than I could possibly read.

Or is that the "lousy feed" you're talking about? No, I don't think so. :)

The feed's time stamps don't include time zone data, so my newsreader mis-sorts them. For instance, the feed right now has an article on it that's time-stamped 4:20, but the feed for that article went out at 3:20 local time. So that's screwed up.

Also, the feed only includes an excerpt of the story, which I guess is kind of okay if it's absolutely necessary, but the excerpts are uselessly short. If you can't feed full text, at least feed the first graf or two.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, really. It's just a little disappointing when feed technology, which is SO cool when it's done just right, comes up a little bit short.

Good points, Jeff. I haven't been able to keep up with them (I oversubscribe to feeds to a ridiculous extent), so I hadn't noticed the problems you mentioned.

So yeah, what's up with that, Kevin? Fix your shit! ;)

You know, while I'm at it, the feed's apparently not encoded correctly, either. (I know, I'm a whiney bitch.) Behold the latest article, Roger Simon's "'Fear of Republicans' or 'Fear of Flying.'"

The feed from Roger Simon's site is perfect: full text, encoded in UTF-8. The feed from RNCBloggers looks like this:

“Fear of Republicans�or “Fear of Flying�

Airplane Blather – On the Way to the RNC Most of my life I rarely talked to Republicans -- not seriously anyway. If I did it was without the full knowledge that they were Republicans. I didn't think they would...

Pretty seriously horked up, it seems to me.

Again, not complaining, just offering helpful observations. :-)

At the risk of piling on, and perpetuating a two-person conversation using someone else's site, but like Jeff, truly in the interest of helping out, I notice the same effect. In fact, I get the same thing from the Wizbang feed.

I had an identical situation on my own blog when I inadvertently set the encoding to Universal (Unicode UTF-8). Setting it back to Western (Windows-1252) cleared it all up.

HTH.

I've figured out where the error is for the time zone info, we're working on that one. Same for the strange character issues.

The feed only includes an excerpt because the idea isn't to take traffic from the individual blogs...

I've figured out where the error is for the time zone info, we're working on that one. Same for the strange character issues.

The feed only includes an excerpt because the idea isn't to take traffic from the individual blogs...

Yeah, I see the point about pulling an excerpt, but the brevity of the extracts you're feeding is something I'd like to see improved. How about pulling the first graf instead of just grabbing the top 225 bytes or whatever it is? Or at the very least, making sure to grab complete sentences instead of truncating in mid-sentence?

Re: Encoding in Feeds
Honestly, I'm not quite sure what the issue is. Nothing at all is done to the data we bring in from the other sites' feeds (except truncation when they're too long) -- if we can figure out what it is, we'll fix it up ASAP.

Re; Lengths of Excerpts
The excerpt length is 50 words. There's also a title. If, between a title and the first 50 words you can't decide whether you want to read the full article or not, honestly, the author has simply failed to capture your interest. That may matter to them, it may not. Bottom line, though, is that there's no reason for the RSS feed to contain any more than the main page of the site contains and, as Kevin pointed out, the feed (and the site) are teases of what's on the real author's site.

There are some good practical / technical reasons we're not pulling paragraphs/sentences/etc... which I can go into at length if anyone cares, but I don't think anyone really does.

And we fixed the encoding issue this evening. FWIW - MT 2.661 templates - not optimal. MT 3.0D - much simpler.

Just for amusement's sake, you really ought to invite rall.com as a non-credentialed blogger.

I care, Pete. Why the arbitrary 50-word limit instead of scanning for the first end-of-paragraph tag? Or, if not an end-of-graf tag, why not grab the first 50 words and then additional words until you come to the first terminal punctuation mark or end-of-graf tag?

I've got a problem with the whole idea of a feed as a teaser, anyway. But that's another discussion entirely.