Article:		Parsing RSS At All Costs
Subject:		auto email service?
Date:		2003-01-22 21:00:01
From:		Matthew Haughey
I have used arsdigita's free uptime service for 6 years now (now at http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime/), and since my MetaFilter feed relies on a community of users inputing all sorts of junk, the feed is frequently broken by a curly quote, emdash, and/or a stray umlaut. My email is listed on the feed, which I get occasional messages from users complaining that it is broken. While I look for a perfect search and replace high ascii-to-entity encoder, it'd be great if maybe part of the RSS validator allowed me to signup for RSS monitoring, checking maybe a couple times a day for errors and emailing me if it didn't pass muster with the validator.

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• I'll write one if you'll run it
  2003-01-23 11:52:54 Aaron Swartz [Reply]
  
  I'll write such a service if someone else will host it.
  
  
  • I've written a simple version
    2003-01-24 10:40:07 Aaron Swartz [Reply]
    
    I've got a simple script that doesn't handle bounces or unsubscribes, but does the job.
    
    

• Re: auto email service?
  2003-01-22 21:09:33 Mark Pilgrim [Reply]
  
  Good idea. You are free to start such a service. The RSS validator is open source.

  
  http://feeds.archive.org/validator/about.html#opensource
  
  

  • Re: auto email service?
    2003-01-22 22:21:25 Matthew Haughey [Reply]
    
    Is there an api to the existing service? I'd be open to building a quick site to check urls being watched, but ideally I'd like to send a URL in a soap or xml-rpc packet and just wait for a response back to trigger emails if an error code is reported or do nothing if it works fine.