The Times RSS feeds are broken

When I reviewed The Times web site the other week, I was generally complimentary about it, and the site's overall provision of RSS feeds, even if I was a little bit unhappy that they were not using the standard orange RSS icon.

However, my qualms about the blue "Newsfeed" logo are nothing compared to something I discovered this afternoon when doing some more research on newspaper RSS feeds.

The Times RSS feeds are broken.

Badly.

I don't know whether this problem has existed since the site was re-designed, or is a temporary glitch, but at the time of writing, every single link in their news feeds is wrong.

In the XML The Times is publishing a relative link to their individual stories - rather than the absolute link that is required for a feed reader to know where to look for the content.

Instead of linking to http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1747562.ece for example, the links in their RSS feeds are without The Times domain name in front of them.

Presented with just /tol/news/world/article1747562.ece, a browser doesn't know it is supposed to be looking on The Times site.

This is in breach of the RSS 2.0 specifications, which state that:

RSS places restrictions on the first non-whitespace characters of the data in <link> and <url> elements. The data in these elements must begin with an IANA-registered URI scheme, such as http://, https://, news://, mailto: and ftp://

Funnily enough, when I try and follow a link from their RSS feeds in Bloglines using Firefox, I don't actually end up with an error message.

The browser does its best to interpret a protocol free URL that simply starts /tol/, and so re-directs me to a site called Transitions Online.

This site is at http://www.tol.cz, which is, I guess, the best match Firefox can find.

Transitions Online must get an awful lot of strange error messages in their logfiles, from people trying to view content from The Times via RSS.

Of course, the RSS feeds still work to an extent - subscribers get to see a selection of headlines and summaries from their chosen feed.

But, like all the newspapers I reviewed in the last fortnight, the reason that The Times only publishes excerpts in their RSS feed is to encourage users to click through to read the full story on site, and thus drive advertising revenue.

At the moment, the RSS feeds from The Times are nothing but a dead end for their users.

This article is part of a series looking at the Web 2.0 features on British newspaper web sites. It features reviews of the Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times.

There are also overviews of some of the "Web 2.0" features each newspaper provides. These cover social bookmarking links, blog features, RSS feeds and the location of RSS feed information.

Posted by Martin Belam, May 4, 2007
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