Trend Sweet Trend RSS Feed

I've just created my first RSS feed for trend sweet trend. To do it, I scraped my own page and built the file. You've got options: add it to your feed reader, use a site like feedburner to add it to your page, or subscribe with Firefox so it's always close at hand.

Creating an RSS feed isn't too hard but there were a couple of stumbling blocks. The first one I ran into was that firefox refused to recognize my php generated document as rss.

This may have been because I had some extra whitespace outside of the code, but I thought it was because of the webserver not sending the output of php suffixed scripts as type application/rss+xml. That's why I'm now generating the page using a remote perl script.

The other problem I ran into was encoding of funny characters like double greater than symbols. Why people want to use these in their page titles, I don't know but I solved that using a CDATA section for each title.

More trends and feeds to come...