CLOSED: [2017-03-29 Wed 18:57] SCHEDULED: <2017-03-29 Wed>
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: [2017-03-29 Wed 15:46]
:ID: 2017-03-29-link-only-feeds
:END:
:LOGBOOK:
- State "DONE"       from "DONE"       [2017-04-23 Sun 16:40]
- State "DONE"       from "DONE"       [2017-03-30 Thu 12:25]
- State "DONE"       from "NEXT"       [2017-03-29 Wed 18:57]
:END:

Update 2017-03-30: Remark on NewsBlur

Update 2017-04-23: Added link to blog article with my decision and
changed I made.

Hi!

In the past, Christoph did inform me of many cases where the
Atom-feed of my blog had formal issues so that his reader did
complain.

I learned that the XML of a valid Atom feed is quite different to the
HTML code for the browsers.

By the way: The [[http://newsblur.com/][feed aggregator of my choice]] and [[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grazerss&hl=en][my feed app]] which is
connecting to the aggregator did not have any issue at all whereas other
clients stopped working.

Case by case I fixed XML issues, mostly via search-and-replace of
things like =mdash= to its numeric variant or fixing HTML-snippets of
Twitter or Amazon that were valid HTML but not valid feed-XML.

-----------------

Tedious job.

A way to fix this would be to use a library which converts my HTML to
valid XML for the feeds. A short research did not result in a
satisfying library for the job. Most libraries do much more, resulting
in many additional dependencies that I tend to keep at a minimum for
lazyblorg.

Therefore, I am thinking of switching to links-only-feeds. Such feeds
would contain everything as now except for the content of the article
body. This would eliminate all feed issues for once. A downside would
be that you can not read these lines (the content) within your feed
aggregator. Instead, you'd have to follow the included URL and open
the articles in your browser or configure your feed reader to show the
underlying web page.

What do you think about it? Does it break any of your workflows? You
don't care? Drop me a line so that I can think about alternatives.

------------

Update 2017-04-23: Read [[id:2017-04-23-link-only-feed][this article]] on what I decided to change for
my feeds.