I’ve been using the Feed Demon RSS reader since 1.0 rc4, which was around November-ish. I liked it so much, that when 1.0 went final in January, I bought a license. This was the first time I’d ever actually bought shareware, and it kinda made me feel good. Wierd.

Anyways, the only real problem I had with Feed Demon was that it didn’t properly parse the feed for Dunstan’s blog. I went back and looked at his XML, and he wasn’t using a <link> tag for his permalinks. He was using the <guid> tag instead. Hmmm…

I went and dug up the RSS 2.0 specification so that I could read up on the <guid> tag. The tags details say this:

If the guid element has an attribute named isPermaLink with a value of true, the reader may assume that it is a permalink to the item, that is, a url that can be opened in a Web browser, that points to the full item described by the <item> element.

That’s all fine and dandy, but Dunstan’s <guid> tag didn’t have that. Oh no! Was Dunstan’s XML feed not well-formed? *Gasp!* I read on, and came across this:

isPermaLink is optional, its default value is true. If its value is false, the guid may not be assumed to be a url, or a url to anything in particular.

Okay, okay. So Dunstan knows what he’s doing. Fair enough. But will my favorite feed reader never be able to properly read Dunstan’s Permalinks?

I submitted this as a bug report on the Feed Demon newsgroup last week. Today, Nick Bradbury released Feed Demon 1.1 Beta 1 (it kinda rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). This issue is fixed in this release. Woo-hoo! There’s also basic support for Atom 0.3, which is kinda cool too.

I love the power of feedback.