Another furball for Planet Xavier

MySpace recently added RSS feeds for blogs, so tonight I went ahead and told Planet to use a slew of those feeds for pX. (More on the MySpace feeds later today at Minh’s Notes.) As it turns out, those feeds are flawed in the same way Xanga’s feeds are: they don’t provide proper dates. For some reason, MySpace is reporting that every blog post ever authored there was published on Monday, January 1^st, 1900, at exactly 3:00 in the morning EST.

Can you say… Y2K?

Thanks to this issue, all the old MySpace blog entries are showing up at the top. So I’m imploring everyone to get to work on their blogs: write! Post some entries – your schedule, your cat, anything – to push all those entries down the page. (And I worked so hard on the entry that ended up at the bottom, too.) Looks like I’ll have to toil to fix these feeds like I did with the Xanga feeds…

Problems at Planet Xavier once again

Yes, Planet Xavier coughed up a furball of old entries again. Please continue blogging, so that these old posts get pushed down the page. Thanks.

Permanent links make a return

Permanent links to Xanga and MySpace entries at Planet Xavier were horked last night, due to a glitch with the XML parser. I’m currently working around the problem with a little hack of a solution, but I hope to get to the root cause of the problem sometime Tuesday.

Lucky for all of you, it’s once again possible to visit the Xangas again. If only I could figure out what’s going on with the timestamps – the dates and times are going bizerk!

Never mind…

Never mind about that… all the Xangas are back up again, thanks to a little typo I made.

Testing…

Yes, all the old posts are up, and as usual, it’s limited to Xangas. Ironically, it’s because I’m testing some code that’ll let Planet understand the (incorrectly-formatted) dates that Xanga feeds include. It failed miserably, of course, but I think I know what’s going on, and I just thought of a novel way of preventing this Xanga spam from ever occurring again: backing up the cache!

</sarcasm>

Planet, please go away

This is a test (yes, once again) of the Planet Xavier exclusion mechanism. Use the following code:

PLANET_GO_AWAY

… to tell Planet to ignore your post. Feel free to put it in HTML comments, like so:

<!-- PLANET_GO_AWAY -->

Good for extremely personal stuff. But if the feature is working properly, you hopefully won’t be reading this through Planet Xavier anytime soon.



Update: Yes! It finally works! This is to be used sparingly; if you regularly post highly personal stuff, it’s probably safer to go with your blogging service’s “Private” feature, since that’s sure to work even if Planet goes bizzerk for some reason.

Here we go again…

Yes, I’m once again testing the pX exclusion mechanism. Doesn’t that name just sound so official?