clicked and groaned
Although it’s probably the hipsterest music site online, I do enjoy reading Pitchfork from time-to-time to catch up on what those whippersnappers are listening to. The site has long gone without any RSS feeds for either its news or its record reviews. I hoped that they would add feeds when they launched a redesign in early 2005, but apparently they’re too indie for metadata, leaving me months behind in my Arcade Fire news. Lately, I’ve been using an RSS feed that a reader created that scraped titles and permalinks from the news section, but today the feed included a post from that user’s blog informing me that Pitchfork has added what it regards as RSS feeds. Unfortunately, “they are not actually XML, but broken XHTML pages,” so they’re at least as dicey as the scraped feeds. (I’ve never coded content management servers, but, dang, outputting valid RSS or Atom can’t be that hard, can it?) Regardless, the underground feed is going down, so I’ll have to switch to the approved Pitchfork feeds.
Valid markup or not, Pitchfork’s feeds take an approach I find a little irritating, segregating different content into different feeds without offering a master feed. In total, there are six different feeds for news, record reviews, features, “best new music,” free downloads, and reviews of individual tracks. I mostly just want the news and record reviews, but I would settle for a master feed that includes all six. In particular, why are news and features in separate feeds? Features come out so infrequently that it seems ridiculous to subscribe to a separate feed. Anyway, congratulations Pitchfork, you’re bringing back 2001 like it never went away.
