Fri, 18 Jul 2008

HTML headers and PHP

That was easy ... Months ago I played around with PHP and coded an RSS feed for my photo galleries. Everything looked fine but Google Reader just wouldn't let me subscribe to the feed. I wondered why and somehow got the idea that it might have something to do with headers.

Turns out I was right. Today, when I read Binny VA's post, "Rules for Creating an RSS Feed", I realised that PHP has a function to send headers. It's called, er, header.

So I looked it up in the PHP manual ("header - Send a raw HTTP header") and then had another look (using wget) at both my photo feed and a feed which I knew to be technically OK. This still didn't give me a clue. However, I found a line in my feed which I had commented out - for what reason totally beats me - and which started "header" ... Deleting the 2 commenting-out slashes and uploading the file again was all that was necessary to make the feed acceptable to Google Reader.

D'oh!

(The feed for my photo galleries is here.)

Posted on 18 Jul 2008 at 22:06 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink