It’s great to see the long-awaited improvement to the BBC’s blog infrastructure coming fully on-stream. I’m hearing reports of long, long hours being worked this week; and the inevitable post-launch debugging work continues. The Beeb’s Jem Stone describes the full horror, and scores extra points for an obscure Guns N Roses reference.
But I’ve spotted one interesting development for the ‘bug or feature?’ desk. A few of the Beeb’s blogs are unexpectedly pumping out full text RSS feeds. Not all, it must be said. But as I write this, the feed for the BBC Internet Blog is dropping the entire posting, formatting and all, into the ‘description’ field; the feed for the dotlife blog is delivering the full text, stripped of all formatting, so it renders (in most cases) as a single paragraph. Looking back through the archives I compile as a bi-product of my onepolitics site, it looks like Nick Robinson’s feed was full-text for a brief while, but isn’t any more. Sadly.
If it’s a bug, guys, please don’t fix it. In fact, let it multiply. Given the problems you’ve had supporting the huge volume of comments, it’s probably in your interests to minimise hits to the blogging platform. Let Google Reader and Bloglines share the strain. And encourage us to actually read more of your stuff.
Responses
Hi Simon, thanks for the comments. We want to deliver full-text RSS feeds, and plan to do so in due course, but there are some issues we need to get through first.
The brief appearence of full-text feeds this week was due to an inconsistency between MT 3.2 and MT 4 that we hadn’t forseen.
Simon, this is the first time, I mean, reading ‘Puffbox’. Many more good reads to come, I hope.