Anyone know who runs the RSS feeds for the O'Reilly blogs?

They're all broken in a very important way. Take for example, Tim O'Reilly's weblog. The RSS URL is a gnarly one: http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/index.php?s=/Tim+O'Reilly/&sw=dc_creator&_fl=rss10&t=1ALL.

No big deal, right? I only need to put it in my aggregator once. The trouble is that no matter which of the O'Reilly weblog feeds you subscribe to, they all have the exact same title in the XML:

...
  <channel rdf:about="http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/">
    <title>Meerkat: An Open Wire Service</title>
    <link>http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/</link>
...

Yup. Every one of them says "Meerkat: An Open Wire Service" in my aggregator. That makes it really hard to subscribe to more than one O'Reilly weblogger's feed.

I guess I can't compalin too much. After all, they finally added the orange XML buttons to each author's blog. But still. This really seems like a no-brainer. Does nobody at O'Reilly subscribe to their co-{author,worker}'s blogs?

Posted by jzawodn at August 01, 2003 06:01 PM

Reader Comments
# anode said:

I find this annoying too, but doesn't your aggregator let you change the titles?

on August 1, 2003 06:28 PM
# john said:

Jeremy,

Send an email to Rael Dornfest (he pretty much built the Meerkat back in the day -- that, and he's a super nice guy). Tell him your concerns... he'll either fix them, or pass them on to the higher ups if he can't fix them right now.

Also, my aggregator (NetNewsWire) lets me over-ride the default RSS title (get a Mac Jeremy) ;)

on August 1, 2003 08:02 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

I know you can change the titles in some aggregators, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be reasonable defaults.

on August 1, 2003 08:38 PM
# wil said:

Doesn't anyone at O'Reilly get up from their desks and actually talk to their co-workers,authors anymore instead of reading their blogs on a screen?

Sorry, couldn't resist ...

on August 2, 2003 02:18 AM
# Daniel Fisher said:

use.perl.org's journals has a similar issue. While Sharpreader has recently added the ability to rename a feed, I was left with looking at 'Use Perl Journals' (the title of every journal) for a while.

So, I whipped up a perl script that goes to the site every 30 minutes, downloads the feed, and changes each feed's title to the author's name.

If anyone's interested, I could post the code on my website...

(Warning: it's functional, but primitive.)

on August 2, 2003 09:34 AM
# Edd Dumbill said:

There's an issue open on this with O'Reilly, I complained about it the other week.

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on November 13, 2003 02:41 PM
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