Blogger RSS Issues

Blogger Pro, which I use for the weblogish portions of this site, will create an RSS feed. The implementation is… somewhat lacking. It will only produce RSS elements if you use titles, and explicitly title every post you want showing up in the RSS file. You don’t have to show the title, but you do need one. You can see the practical result of this in the Blogger produced RSS file here. This post has a title, while no other posts on the page do. The title does not show up on the page, but does show up in the RSS file. The other posts show up on the page, but don’t show up in the RSS file. End result: I’m using RSSify to deal with RSS. It’s free, but I’d be dramatically more willing to renew my Blogger Pro subscription if I thought that the Blogger crew were going to fix this. The other features don’t appeal to me that much.

Suggestions on ways to fix the issue:

• acceptable: have an option to just automatically set the title to the first N (32 seems to work) characters of the post (this is what NetNewsWire does to display RSS items which don’t have titles, and it works pretty well)
• better: support RSS 2.0 output, which doesn’t require a title element

This concludes the tool related frustration portion of the evening.