phil ringnalda

Back in the day, when Gmail first added Atom feeds, Firefox picked up a bug because Live Bookmarks showed “Live Bookmark failed to load” for a feed with no entry, which is what Gmail produces when you don’t have any unread items in your inbox. (Actually, present tense “shows” unless you’re using a trunk build, since it took me a year to decide nobody else would fix it, so it didn’t make 1.5).

So, now I’m playing around with the idea of creating a set of Atom testcases. Since I was starting by testing feed-level things my very first one didn’t have an entry. When you want to subscribe to a feed in Google Reader, you are forced to preview it first, and if there aren’t any entries to preview, you’re just told awkwardly The item you selected has no items, and you don’t get any way to subscribe. The OPML import only takes the title from the OPML, or uses “Untitled Subscription” if you don’t give it one there, so if you’re testing the handling of feed titles, there’s no way around adding an entry. (And, as I already knew it would be, it’s buggy with type="text" titles, thanks to double-decoding. mph is right: it’s not all that fun when you get to the point of “I don’t even see the applications. All I see is bug, bug, bug.”)

And I know that saying this is utterly trite, but it drives me crazy that I can’t file a bug on it in their public bug tracker, and then look at the source code to see whether it’s easy enough that I can fix it myself.