blogging, software development, windows

Bugs in IE7 RSS platform?

6 Comments

I welcome the introduction of the RSS platform in IE7; I think a central repository for RSS feeds is a great idea, even though Outlook’s RSS integration strikes me as totally broken. 

But is it reliable? I was using it to browse Jensen Harris’s excellent blog and noticed that the entries were from somebody else. A look at the feed properties reveals all:

It appears that the RSS store had somehow zapped the blog, but kept its title attached to a different feed, Bruce Schneier’s security blog as it happens.

I don’t think I have much hope of discovering why this bug occurred, unless someone from the team would care to comment, but it does cast doubt on the RSS store’s reliablity. Or could it be a problem with my blogreader app? The only time this writes to the store is when it marks a feeditem as read, which it does by setting the IsRead property on a FeedItem reference. Strange.

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6 thoughts on “Bugs in IE7 RSS platform?”

  1. Tim,
    First of all thank you for your coverage and usage of the RSS platform, as well as for your honest feedback.

    We have never seen or heard about this problem before. The only issue that even remotely reminds me of what you’re seeing was related to a proxy randomly returning incorrect content.

    If you come up with additional details or would just like to discuss this issue further feel free to email us at teamrss@microsoft.com.

    – Miladin

  2. Miladin,

    Thanks for the comment, it’s appreciated. I’ll certainly feedback any info if the bug recurs or I can discern any pattern to it.

    Tim

  3. Tim,
    it’s possible to change the URL of a feed via the API. Is it possible that you ran a script or app that manipulates feed properties?

    Feed free to email us (as Miladin said) as you uncover more details.
    -Walter

  4. Thanks Walter. I agree that seems plausible, though I checked my own app and it only ever writes to the IsRead property of an item, as I mentioned.

    Then again, there is Outlook 2007. I had an odd occurrence with this yesterday. Both the RSS options are OFF in Outlook 2007, since I don’t like the way it integrates with the store. However yesterday I was doing a POP3 send and receive for a test, and noticed it was retrieving RSS feeds. I cancelled the operation, looked in the settings, and mysteriously the RSS Sync was back ON.

    I know it was off before, because the only feeds I had in the Outlook RSS folder were the few it had retrieved before I cancelled the send and receive. And I know I didn’t re-enable it.

    So maybe Outlook is doing some other unexpected stuff with the RSS store; but this is pure speculation.

    Tim

  5. Hello,
    Sorry but I couldn’t find another place to post. Is there a FREE way I can synchronize the RSS Feeds between two or more computers using IE7? Sorta like a “Foxmarks for IE7”?

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.
    Jim

  6. You can export the feeds to opml and import them on the other machine, but that is probably not what you mean.

    I don’t know of any other means of synching.

    Tim

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