The fact that The Times has revamped its website failed to pass me by. It was mentioned in the paper on Saturday (I buy the dead tree version on a Saturday, it lasts the whole weekend and the TV guide lasts the week), and diamond geezer talked about it on his blog.
Now, when it comes to following events, I’m usually a BBC News kinda guy. I subscribe to several BBC news feeds.
I noticed that the new Times site also has a set of feeds – I’ve no idea whether the old one did, too. Rather unintuitively, they are located in the “Audio/Video” section of the site, despite not actually referring to audio or video stories.
They are RSS feeds rather than Atom, which is sure to disappoint some.
Another trivial annoyance is that the title and description of all of the feeds is “TimesOnline:rss” regardless of category. And the files are presented as XML, which doesn’t validate due to undeclared entities. And the feeds themselves don’t validate either.
So, all in all, good effort, but no cigar.
I’ve emailed them to point out all of these issues. No response so far.
Andy Piper
