Sunday, 17 January 2010, 15:24:13 EST

A while back I wrote about using Google Reader. At the time, I had not noticed a problem with it. But after few weeks I realized that it wasn't showing any new items for my TVRage feeds. After much investigation I learned that Reader cache's articles based on the GUID associated with the article in the feed source. That makes sense. Google is, after all, reading a LOT of feeds every day. They can drastically speed up their service if they cache common articles.

But there is a problem. TVRage's feeds are broken. A quick inspection showed me that the articles in TVRage's feeds do not include GUIDs. So then I validated feed and learned that even the date formats are wrong. In other words, their feeds are completely broken. It's a wonder they work at all.

Some time previously I had posted to TVRage's forums in a thread asking for multiple country support in the feeds. That thread never got updated with any information regarding the RSS feeds. So it stood to reason that the issues I am describing now would not get fixed very quickly if I reported them. Therefore I hacked together a couple of PHP scripts specific to my personal feeds.

My scripts have been working quite well for my own use for quite some time. Today, I release a single script that you can use yourself for all of your TVRage feeds. You can download the script from my code page. The included "README" details how to configure and use the script. If it's not clear, you will need your own web server, with PHP support, to host the script.

** Update 18 January **
Articles are showing up as new every time Google refreshes its cache. Don't download this script yet (unless you want to fix the bug for me).

** Update 19 January **
See article 341 for information on a potentially working version of this script.

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