It finally looks like The Sun have finally fixed their RSS feeds. It’s only three months since I first noticed the problem. In that time I’ve emailed them a number of times on the subject. They haven’t bothered to reply to my mail, so I don’t know if they even read them, or if someone in their web department finally noticed the basic error that they’d made.
I say that they’ve fixed the error. All I know for sure is that they’ve corrected the URLs in the feed so you now get absolute URLs that work outside of the Sun’s web site. As Martin has pointed out, they’ve still done this in a spectacularly half-hearted manner and they have probably lost most of the RSS traffic that they had built up over the previous years.
And whilst the most pressing problems in their feeds seem to be fixed, it’s worth noting that the feeds they’re publishing now are far from perfect. Running their latest news feed through a feed validator (something that any sensible feed publisher will do) shows that there are still quite a few interesting errors. At the current rate, I expect them all to be fixed sometime around the middle of 2012.
I was just looking for a permalink to the “99% of the UK wants the death penalty” story so I could blog about how ridiculous the sun readership is, and I came across another gem.First, you may have noticed all stories linked to from the front page have “homepage” in the url…something tells me this isn’t a permalink… Although I can’t see an alternative anywhere on the page.So I thought I’d have more luck emailing the story to myself, thinking they’d email the permalink. Clicking the “email this story to a friend” link opened an outlook “new message” window, with the subject:Check out this article name=And, suprisingly, no link. Seriously, the simplest of tasks…TBH, I’d be ashamed to tell anyone I worked on The Sun webteam.