Blogger Spamming Planet Geospatial Again

September 26th, 2006 · 6 Comments · GIS

Yea, thanks for all the emails. I’m not sure what Google is up to, but whatever they did caused every Blogger blog to spam Planet Geospatial. It should pass eventually. Right now it doesn’t matter if you use FeedBurner or not as every Blogger feed has been reset for some reason.

Tags: Planet Geospatial·Site News

6 responses so far ↓

1 Larry Renolds // Sep 26, 2006 at 8:08 pm

Why do Blogger feeds get messed up on Planet GS?
2 James Fee // Sep 26, 2006 at 8:13 pm

Simple reason Larry. Google does some weird things with their feeds. Take for example Glenn’s blog entry from tonight. You’ll see some HTML code for an image appear on Planet GS.

See how for some inexplicable reason, Blogger changes the brackets to their ASCII code? That isn’t well formed XML at all. My feedparser can’t handle it very well and I probably should upgrade to a new one at some point (but then I’d have to move from Python to PHP). Still you’d think that Google would adhear to well formed XML, don’t you?
3 Brian Flood // Sep 27, 2006 at 5:44 am

errr, that is well-formed XML

The XML tags (fully closed) are the only places where the angle brackets should occur. Any contained data, like the embedded HTML above should be escaped (”&lt” in place of “
4 James Fee // Sep 27, 2006 at 6:13 am

OK, you got me. Well formed feeds was really what I was after. The problem comes up when I run the HTML sanitizer to remove all all HTML tags (well most of them). I could do something like this I guess:

data = data.replace(”&lt”, “< ")
5 Brian Flood // Sep 27, 2006 at 6:38 am

ahhh, I knew what you meant:)

They should just dump the post entries into CDATA tags and make everything work smoothly
6 James Fee // Sep 27, 2006 at 6:43 am

I know, but I can’t figure out why for the life of me they don’t. I hate making changes to something I didn’t write (feedparser.py) just to fix something like this.