one nitpick

In the email (at least the ones I get- I have gmail.com), each posting has its title, then the date/time posted, then the post content. BUT the author's name isn't given. How come?

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by: homerun @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 01:27:42 AM UTC

A fair point

Unfortunately, it's never been one we've been able to figure out. The emails are pulled from our RSS feed, and for whatever reason, FeedBurner can't seem to figure out the "author" field. It's been a while since I looked into this, though, so I'll try checking it out again.

And thanks for supporting SSP.

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by: DavidNYC @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 01:46:25 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

That's odd

The author's name shows up in Google Reader.  

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by: andgarden @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 02:36:00 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

That *is* weird

If you take a look at the site's XML, there is no "author" tag. But then if you plug the feed into Feed Validator, it does show an author tag. Any ideas?

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by: DavidNYC @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 03:14:01 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Outside of my expertise

Safari think's there's an author tag, but it shows up as:

{div class="apple-rss-author" title="DavidNYC">DavidNYC{/div} (modified to prevent rendering).

Is there some kind of user agent sniffing going on?

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by: andgarden @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 03:29:03 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Not entirely sure

What you mean by "user agent sniffing"....

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by: DavidNYC @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 04:03:36 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Wikipedia explains:

The term user agent sniffing refers to the practice of websites showing different content when viewed with a certain user agent.

I assume that the same practice applies with RSS feeds. but I don't know if it's happening here.  

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by: andgarden @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 04:12:49 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Apparently this is the problem

From a helpful emailer:

Your feed has the author element:

{author}James L.{/author}

so [Google] Reader is displaying that when it's present. In the web-based view of the feed, that generally doesn't get displayed (it's present, just not typically shown). For the e-mail [sent out by FeedBurner], the e-mail service sends out what's in the actual body of the post, and since the author is tagged separate from the {item}, it's not displayed.

If you have control over the CMS outputting the feed, hack it to include the {author} info in the feed {item} - that'd be by far the easiest way to proceed.

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by: DavidNYC @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 05:28:09 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

gotcha

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by: andgarden @ Mon Mar 01, 2010 at 13:23:09 PM UTC

[ Parent ]