RSS is a wonderful tool to keep us informed of the lastest project news, but the RSS feeds provided by all project sites are likely to cause some problems in most RSS readers.

The probems seem to come from the improper use of the guid element, the following URL goes to the specification of the RSS 2.0:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#ltguidgtSubelementOfLtitemgt

<guid> sub-element of <item>

<guid> is an optional sub-element of <item>.

guid stands for globally unique identifier. It's a string that uniquely identifies the item. When present, an aggregator may choose to use this string to determine if an item is new.

<guid>http://some.server.com/weblogItem3207</guid>

There are no rules for the syntax of a guid. Aggregators must view them as a string. It's up to the source of the feed to establish the uniqueness of the string.

If the guid element has an attribute named "isPermaLink" with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the <item> element. An example:

<guid isPermaLink="true">http://inessential.com/2002/09/01.php#a2</guid>

isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true. If its value is false, the guid may not be assumed to be a url, or a url to anything in particular.

If a feed doesn't use the guid element, it can also use the link element to make news globally unique (not just unique in the current feed).

Best regards,
Yin Gang

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Welcome To Team China!

The following site is a validator for syndicated feeds:

http://www.feedvalidator.org/

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Welcome To Team China!

The RSS-Feed on the main page does not work any more. Could you please check this?

Works perfectly fine here, what you trying to use to view it in?

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In IE6 I sould be able to see the XML, but it shows an XML-Error because of a not defined entity: "&uuml;"

"
This project, based at the University of M&uuml;nster in Germany,
----------------------------------------------------^
"

And my RSS-Feed import for our phpBB-Board also cannot read it.
Error-Message: "XML error: undefined entity at line 32"

Maybe the character-encoding was changed, it should be iso-8859-1. All RSS-feeds from the projects are working correctly, but this one suddenly stopped working: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/rss_main.php

When you copy this feed into the validator (see some posts below), you can see what is wron with this feed:

http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fboinc.berkeley.edu%2Frss_main.php

Result:

Sorry
This feed does not validate.

line 18, column 19: guid must be a full URL, unless isPermaLink attribute is false (9 occurrences)

line 24, column 37: pubDate must be an RFC-822 date-time (9 occurrences)

line 32, column 46: Undefined named entity: uuml

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BOINC RSS feed is not valid again.

Here is an error message from http://www.feedvalidator.org/

This feed does not validate.

line 21, column 24: Undefined named entity: Eacute [help]

    and is based at the &Eacute;cole Polytechnique in Paris.</description>

I checked in the patch into CVS, it just has to be applied to the BOINC site. Should be there shortly.

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A fix has now been committed. It should be updated within 24 hours.

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Thanks, the rss-feed is correct now.