Steven Frank’s tip for improving your RSS

Steven Frank has a great simple tip for improving your RSS: subscribe to your own feed (or feeds).

What if your feed appears weird, or doesn’t appear at all, in NetNewsWire? Validate it. Ctrl-click on the subscription and choose Validate this Feed. (Yes, this command should also be in the main menu. In the future it will be.)

It the feed is valid, but NetNewsWire does something strange, then let us know about it: it’s mostly likely a bug.

But if the feed is not valid, you have a few options for fixing it:

1. If you’re running your own software, then you may have a bug to fix.

2. If you’re running someone else’s software, but you’re using a customized template or script to generate your feed, check your work.

3. If you’re running someone else’s software, but you haven’t customized anything, report a bug to the person or company who created your software. Be sure to include the URL of your feed, so they can validate it too and see what the problem is. (Important: be nice. Software has bugs. Most developers are conscientious and work hard at fixing bugs.)