[drewprops]

I want to customize my "index.xml" template in a MovableType setup so that people who check the site from a News Reader will be taken to a different link than the permanent link for each individual article, which by nature have no styling or obvious links back to the main site.

The URLs that I want to use have PHP variables tacked onto the end (because the site is driven by PHP). However, when I use those links I get the warning "XML parsing error".

1. Can News Readers parse a typical PHP address?

ex. http://www.applenova.com/dummy/test.php?id=1&class=g

2. To do so must I convert the ampersands, questionmarks and equal signs to unicode?

3. Is there something else I'm missing?

Ta~

EDIT: sorry for sending to the dummy AN page, is that bad form? Also, I have no problems compiling my MT code, I just need to understand my XML code and why it's not working with the non-text characters. And yes, at home I have a book on DSS and XML... or something like that...

[drewprops]

Well I have more information for anyone curious about this topic.

First off, I have been successful at getting the newsreader NetNewsWire to grab the xml file from the site, see the headlines and correctly link to the file that I wanted. That application has a convenient feature that flings you over to validate any feed at www.feedvalidator.org which helped me determine that I needed to escape my long URL to be generating proper XML code.

The only issue I've yet to resolve is that my feed is encoded as "iso-8859-1", but my server is reporting "US-ASCII" as its type of encoding. When I set my feed to encode as US-ASCII it goes bitchcakes and spits out lots of errors. So right now it's working for NetNewsWire, but not for another newsreader called NewsFire.

I'll test the feed with some other readers to see how it fares.

[Paul]

try encoding everything in UTF-8 (unicode) that might simplify things... (but I'm not sure about the server bits, in theory it should work tho...)

[drewprops]

Well, UTF-8 didn't do it but it didn't hurt either.. the code validates but the reader named NewsFire doesn't see the feed. Maybe you can't add feeds with an unpurchased shareware version? Off to read the instructions.... whoops, it's free. Hrmmmmm....