July 3, 2003
Got no style.
Jack Mottram wrote in this morning, “…there’s something funny happening at splorp.com — whenever I click on a link to an entry to your weblog from NetNewsWire, the web page loads up without a good chunk of code — Doctype, head tags, etc. are all missing, and I am faced with an unstyled, navigation-free version of splorp instead of the usual pretty page.” Indeed, there is something funny and I’ve known about it all along. The reason Jack is seeing unstyled (and frankly, not very valid) weblog entries is because there is no way in the new version of Blogger of specifying how the item links in the RSS feed are formatted. My archives get spat out of Blogger as chunks of raw html, unencumbered by the surrounding document structure, style sheets, and so on. The officially sanctioned archive pages are produced by combining the unadorned Blogger-generated archive data and the CSS together using server side includes. The permalinks in my blog work fine because they point to the correct, combined html. The links in the RSS feed point to the bare-bones include file. Compare these two article links: /blog/archive/2003_06_01_archive#105701113953980154/blog/archive/2003_06_01_archive.html#105701113953980154 The first one points to the archive include file (as does the feed used by NetNewsWire), the second points to the true archive page (as do my permalinks). Both links work, but the second one is a damn site prettier than the other. This wasn’t an issue before the Dano version of Blogger was launched. The RSS feed that was generated prior simply tacked on a item ID anchor to the main weblog URL. That worked because the newsfeed would always have links to articles that were current on your main blog page. Since the news feed is transient, it made sense to me that the articles didn’t need permanent links to the archive pages. The Dano feed is much more robust now, but it assumes too much about where the archives are. I guess I should look into fixing the way I’m building my archive pages instead.
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