Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Google Reader Bug report - use Atom <id/> elements

I am directly subscribed to Sam Ruby's feed. I recently added Planet Intertwingly as well, which contains Sam's blog. Both feeds are served as application/atom+xml. In Google Reader, duplicate items show up (for Sam, Steve Loughran, and others that overlap from my other subscriptions. I don't want to remove individual subscriptions in case Sam removes them from Planet Intertwingly.

From my readings of the spec a while ago, that was an explicit rationale for having id's associated with each entry. As you would expect, the id's are the same. From Planet Intertwingly:


<entry>
<id>tag:intertwingly.net,2004:2619</id>
<link href="http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/07/31/Agile-Financial-Publishing" rel="alternate" type="text/html"/>
<link href="http://intertwingly.net/blog/2619.atom" rel="replies" type="text/html"/>
<title>Agile Financial Publishing</title>
...
</entry>

From Intertwingly:


<entry>
<id>tag:intertwingly.net,2004:2619</id>
<link href="2007/07/31/Agile-Financial-Publishing"/>
<link rel="replies" href="2619.atom" thr:count="1" thr:updated="2007-07-31T12:15:28-04:00"/>
<title>Agile Financial Publishing</title>
...
</entry>

Those atom:id element IRIs appear to be the same to me...

3 comments:

Phil Wilson said...

If you compare

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://intertwingly.net/blog/index.atom

with

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://planet.intertwingly.net/atom.xml

You'll see that although the original IDs are maintained in the gr:original-d attribute, the ID itself is different, and Google Reader specific. You'd hope that this would be reversed at some point.

Anonymous said...

I have a bug report too. Didn't find anything on it but it's very annoying.

Google Reader doesn't show feedburner feeds anymore. If clicked on a feedburner feed in the left pane the URL box becomes something like https://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FGoogleMapsMania#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FGoogleMapsMania
and Google Reader will reload completely without showing anything. It is obvious a part of the URL is repeated where it shouldn't.

I've seen this effect on several PC's now from several networks so it is not a local issue. This problem started a couple of weeks ago. All feedburner feeds seem to have this problem. Not sure whether this is a Feedburner bug or a Google Reader bug. Both are Google.

Where can I report bugs to Google anyway?

James Abley said...

Anonymous: I think Google have improved the way that such problems get reported. Previously, it used to be that you could only discuss them in one of google groups, but now there appears to be a bit more than that.