Atom 1.0 feeds added alongside RSS 2.0 feeds.
For the first few days of the new site, some of you have noticed that the RSS 2.0 feeds that we offer weren't validating properly. That was my fault, but should now be fixed. The cause of the error has been some weird characters that weren't mapping over into the UTF-8 character set properly. The solution was to create a filter in PHP that scours the feed output and re-maps the problem characters. So far I have identified ten characters or so that are causing problems. If anyone finds a feed that does not validate, please let me know so that I can get whatever characters are causing the problem added to the filter.
In addition, I went through and added Atom 1.0 feeds alongside all of the RSS 2.0 feeds on the site. Not for any real reason, just because I wanted to ensure that we were offering feeds for everyone that might want to use them. In most cases, your RSS reader won't even care whether it is accessing and RDF, RSS, or Atom feed, so that is nice. In my case, I use Safari web browser as my RSS reader, along with an application called Vienna. Safari will parse damn near anything, but Vienna requires feeds to be valid. Both will read almost any type of syndication feed that you will find out there, as long as it is valid.
Hopefully someone out there appreciates the atom feeds. If there is any other syndication feed format that you would like to see us implement on the site, and it's not too far off the wall, please feel free to contact me and I will look at getting them implemented.
