Blog software updated
Created: 01.03.2012 16:46 UTC

I just updated the blog software and cleaned up the code a little.

While the code cleanup isn't that interesting, I noticed an interesting fact with blog aggregators that are often called "planet":
I noticed that some of them (namely Planet Symlink) are not able to differentiate between the <updated> and the <published> tag, which resulted in Planet Symlink showing old entries at the top again, just because the <updated> tag was changed. You can currently see all of my past blog posts there, again.
It even got worse: One might accept the fact that it orders by the <updated> tag, and some might even consider that a feature (IMHO, it's not a feature, as it just kills the timeline…), but it actually said on the website that the blog post was created at the date specified in the <updated> tag. Did they never read the ATOM spec to see the difference between <updated> and <published>?

Anyway, the blog update is done. The code I published has already been updated. If you happen to use it and want to use the updated code, keep in mind the date format changed to a more sane one (in the past, it was just copied from the data file, never parsed - it's parsed now. And be sure to have a 1 second delay between updating them, so weird newsreaders don't get confused by two entries having the same <updated> tag). This is also the reason why the <updated> tag changed for all blog posts, as I had to adjust them all.