Contractor UK RSS Feed

[joey122]

Is this possible?

I cannot set up a feed to http://forums.contractoruk.com/accounting-legal/.

I onlys ee all messages

[NickFitz]

N.B. This post should probably be read from end to beginning, but it's late and I can't be bothered to rewrite it to put things in order; also the initial wrong direction I went in contains information that may be of value to somebody, somewhere...

Yup, it's tits-up for me too: subscribing to the feed URL encoded in the head of the page (http://forums.contractoruk.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=4) via NetNewsWire returns a feed containing the first post of the most recent threads in all subforums.

However, subscribing to http://forums.contractoruk.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=4 works correctly and gives only the new threads in Accounting/Legal - you will note that the first feed URL (which I copied from the source of the page) contains an encoded ampersand (&), whereas in the second one I have manually decoded the & into the form & which is what it represents.

The encoding of & into & is correct in the HTML (well, it claims to be XHTML, but don't even get me started on that), which implies that the application you are using to subscribe is tripping over that (or maybe not - read on).

Unless...

<@me scampers off to check, having remembered that there were two feed URLs in the page>

Right, this is using Safari 4, and checking the Technical forum, as I know I don't have an existing subscription to that anywhere on my system: when I click on the RSS icon in the location bar of the browser, it offers me a menu with the "All forums" feed first and the "Technical" forum second. This reflects the order of the feed URLs' appearances in the source of the page.

I could experiment with this further, but it's late, and all you really want is to subscribe to the Accounting/Legal feed. So, copy the following link's URL and paste it into the appropriate place:

http://forums.contractoruk.com/exter...SS2&forumids=4

and you'll get the feed subscription you need.

I assume that your browser just uses the first feed URL it comes across (which is the "every subforum" one), or alternatively it fails to correctly decode the ampersand. Probably the first. Although strictly speaking, the forum software should give a 404 Not Found, rather than defaulting back to the "all forums" feed, when it encounters the &amp;forumids=4 stuff, as that makes it a URL that denotes a different, and non-existent, resource to the "all forums" feed.

Still, it could have been worse: it could have sent you all of TPD