Over in the XML playground I've been quite busy. Dang. I've fixed a lot of bugs. Really nasty mostly simply obvious bugs. Who's doing the QA for this thing? Oh that's right. Free software. Looks like I'm doing the QA - and fixing everything the young whippersnappers didn't learn in CS-101.

The next piece (which is probably going to take a few days) is to re-do the XML aggregator so that it supports something called 'My Feeds'. It's almost there, but not quite. It will already let folks administer XML resources, but they can only view a) an individual feed, or b) the whole universe. I want everybody to be able to build their own data streams.

You've no idea how pathetic is the state of the vast universe of XML feeds. Most of the sites that I'd like to get a feed from don't offer one, or they only offer teasers (a headline followed by 'go to the site to read the story'). That's hardly an information feed. Several overseas sources I tried are using Windows code page 1215 as their XML charset. Yuck. I don't have a UTF-8 convertor for that one. I also can't seem to load any Wordpress sites where somebody used an ampersand or tag element in their category name. Wasn't properly XML escaped. (Note to self: check my own code - I don't think mine escapes these either). So there you have it. For every ten potential feeds I've looked at, only one or two converse in a compatible XML dialect. Of those, only a small fraction offer any meaningful content.