Fight Those Feeds

I had to mess with my RSS Feed(*) template and plugin no fewer than three times recently:

First, Kat starts posting title-less entries and those showed up as blanks. I fixed it by using the feed title if the item title is empty.

Then I added Jason's blog. He uses the ancient RSS 0.9 feed which does not include dates -- thus his entries did not show up in my date-based listing. I fixed this by hacking my RSS Feed Date plugin to try to figure out the date from the item's URL -- this works but his times shows up as 12:00AM

And now Rita posted an entry with a link in its title which messed up the navigation for me. That once was easy to fix, by using my trusty excerpt_words filter.

(*)RSS Feeds is what displays the recent links from other people's blogs in the right column on my main blog page.