Day: December 6, 2005

I’ve been playing with Odeo this week, and I must say, there are some nice features to play with. But, as usual… I find bugs…

Mainly with the RSS feeds. Now, in recent talks with Dave Slusher about AmigoFish, we talked about the problem of outputting invalid RSS feeds, and since AmigoFish sort of re-purposes/re-publishes data from existing feeds, it can be quite difficult to clean everything and output valid XML. (Also, I believe AmigoFish is a one-man operation.) But Odeo, aren’t they a (somewhat) big company with many employees and funding and all of that?

I told Dave I’d cut him a little slack on invalid RSS. With Odeo, I submitted a bug report. To be fair, the Odeo feed was valid, but with warnings. The classic “Apple iTunes DTDs/dtds” warning: The prefix “itunes” generally uses the namespace “http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd”

I’m hoping Odeo can fix this as quick as the guys at Upcoming.org/Yahoo! did. Which brings me to my next point… I’m starting to think I should just freelance myself out to Web 2.0 companies as a service that will test, break, validate, suggest fixes, etc. for their sites. Even the big guys constantly screw things up. Why?

Need some background? See I’m gonna hijack eWeek and More on podkeyword.com first… eWeek has an update: Podcast ‘Hijacker’ Says Business as Usual.

Is there a fix? Well, Atom has a link rel=”self” thingy so a feed at the URI http://my.org/feed/url/ would have this inside the feed: <link rel=”self” href=”http://my.org/feed/url/”></link> How does this help? Well, in theory, if the iTMS (or whoever) was getting the vegan.com feed from podkeyword.com, they could compare the URI to what is listed in the actual feed. Yes, you could still capture, modify, and reserve the feed, but that’s malicious, and were not talking about that (yet.) Since Apple has it’s own namespace’d stuff, it could easily add something like Atom’s rel=”self” thing, right?

This all comes back to the whole issue of claiming a feed doesn’t it? I’m still thinking I could come up with a devious method to defeat any of the existing “claim this feed” mechanisms out there today to actually hijack a feed. (Heck, I’d even use 200 OK’s instead of 302 Found’s like podkeyword does.) Lucky for you I would only do this to point out the flaws in the existing systems. We all know that when it comes to money making schemes I’m not as smart as those other early adopters of podcasting…