Recent News

By Alara: In the past 2-3 weeks I've been working steadily to upgrading the RSS feed as well as updating the News page on the website. Running the RSS feed through Google's RSS Validator tool flagged a TON of invalid items (as Feedburner was not updating for a long time). Some major upgrades as well as changes required or recommended by Feedburner are as follows:

- Feed is now dynamically generated via PHP. New feed URL is at https://tfgmush.org/db/feed.php.
- Feed now references ATOM libraries.
- managingEditor and webMaster tags now give my name in addition to my email, something Feedburner requires.
- A number of feed items did not contain properly formatted pubDates when I was fiddling 2 years ago.
- Some item descriptions had invalid binary characters which were blocking EVERYTHING.
- Item GUIDs were not actually unique. All RSS tutorials say if you make GUIDs equal to the URL to a single news post it should work. Right now, I don't 100% trust it, so I've created an in-game function "guid()" to generate a standard 128-bit GUID for this SQL field.
- The link tag no longer relies on the SQL link field for each post, since URLs and such are changing as I develop. The Link tag is now dynamically generated and routes users to the single news post page for that entry.
- I am thinking I'll simply set the GUID tag to the same string as the link tag. The IDs in the SQL table SHOULD be unique, so it should work.
- I am also planning on possibly putting the UNIX timestamp into the pubDate field in the SQL document, then translating it in PHP whenever the RSS feed is generated.
--Wed, 24 Feb 2016 17:56:22 MST