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.
I’d be an (if anything) BBC person rather than a Times person, too. I guess I ought to take a view of what the Establishment is thinking, but somehow I can’t face helping line Murdoch’s pockets.
Tell me: do they have an Atom feed? Or is the world using the word “RSS” generically these days ? (as I seem to be.) 🙁
No Atom feed, although I did tell them it was disappointing that they had gone with RSS (and broken RSS at that).
They have now responded and said that they are looking at addressing the issues I raised as a matter of urgency. We’ll see.
… and another thing.
I subscribed to the Technology feed, but appear to have a random mix of articles which also cover sport and politics.
Not good.
[…] Andy Piper noted, the title of the Sports feed is imaginatively titled ‘TimesOnline:rss’. Like most UK […]
[…] Andy Piper noted, the title of the Sports feed is imaginatively titled ‘TimesOnline:rss’. Like most UK media […]