Ben’s Techy Musings

Yesterday, during my daily read of Dave Winer’s own RSS feed, I discovered that it was RSS Awareness Day. I really wanted to blog it there and then but hadn’t the time because, ironically, I was working hard at the coalface, hacking away (I like this metaphor) at a client’s RSS-driven microsite.

So in lieu I now declare today “RSS Awareness Day” Awareness Day, because I’m very aware that yesterday was RSS Awareness Day.

During yesterday’s frenzied session I was reminded poignantly that not all of the data in an RSS feed is as reliably parseable as the XML itself. In this case, I was extracting tags from a comma-separated list and putting them into a database.

In my infinite wisdom I put an index on the table which forbade duplicate tags within an item. While parsing 50 items in a test feed nothing went awry but, of course, the very first item on the client’s real feed contained sloppy repetition of tags, exposing my lack of foresight with a nasty SQL duplicate key error.

I live and I learn.