More Textpattern Gripes

I’m obviously going to have some growing pains to go through to find myself happy under Textpattern. It’s a shame really. There’s a certain snottiness that bugged me before, and it bugs me now.

I posted the other day about “Textpattern’s support of Track/pingback”:http://www.technosailor.com/textpattern-and-trackbacks . I can live without those features, but I want them! Trackbacks allow me to notify another blog that I have quoted them and pingbacks allow me to know when another blog has used me as a source.

However, Textpattern’s lack of support for a _mature and robust_ RSS 2.0 feed is ridiculous. If you try to subscribe to my RSS feed here (now it is http://www.technosailor.com/rss/) many RSS readers balk and choke, because 1) it doesn’t think it’s a valid feed because of the lack of proper headers and 2) the entries don’t have proper timestamps.

Don’t ask me why the first thing is the way it is but the second is because Textpattern has opted to use the ancient RSS 0.92 standard which did not support timestamps. Their reason for not using 2.0 “rings incredibly hollow to me”:http://textpattern.com/faq/49/why-rss-092:

bq. We�d like to support a newer version, really we would. Unfortunately, RSS is plagued by ambiguous and sometimes contradictory specifications, and a confusing plethora of competing standards. In early 2004, Mark Pilgrim counted “nine incompatible versions of RSS”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss and more have been created since. We�ll think about improving RSS support when the path forward is clear. Until then, you might like to try Atom instead.

At least give _me_ the option of whether to use it or not. Same with Track/pingback. Don’t take the decision out of my hands.

Tagged as: Blogging, textpattern