Phil Gyford

Update: I realised my mistake. The mysterious items had empty <content:encoded> elements and NetNewsWire was understandably displaying their emptiness. I’d still be interested in hearing thoughts on how much text/HTML should be in a <description> though…

Recently I’ve been working on combining all my writing, notes, links and photos into a single RSS feed. I’ve been using perl and the XML::RSS module, and it’s been fun (well, as fun as my attempts at perl get).

I’m nearly done, but… while the feed appears to work OK when viewed in Bloglines, it doesn’t in NetNewsWire (Lite v1.0.8). NNW displays text for the few items with a <content:encoded> element, but can’t seem to see the <description> elements at all. The feed validates, and so I’m wondering what I’ve done wrong. Anyone have any ideas?

I’m also wondering how much text is acceptable to put in <description>s… should I move some of the photos (and links?) to <content:encoded>s and just have a summary in <description>s?