Blogger and Atom 0.3 vs Atom 1.0

Since mid last year, Atom went through the growing pains of going from version 0.3 to version 1.0. In the fall the feed validator began noting that any blog still on 0.3 was outdated and might have errors, but didn’t actually call the feed invalid/obsolete until April of this year.

Some third party apps, including feed readers, Blog This, Performancing, etc. are not recognizing the outdated version of Atom, purposefully, as the decision was made to stop supporting it across the board. Even the feedvalidator calls the feeds ‘invalid’ at this point.

I actually was digging through the Google groups archives and learned that Google reader was rejecting the feeds just recently. When a problem goes this deep, what does it take to fix it???

UPDATE:  Apparently, the reply to that message indicated it did work.  Read the comments below.

Unfortunately, though Blogger knew this was coming, they chose to continue along with Atom 0.3. So, most Blogger blogs are now having such problems that they can’t even run them through Feedburner to covert them to RSS 2.0 (which is universally recognized like Atom 1.0). When the source feed is that mucked up, there is little choice on the site owner than to make the switch to another blog platform.

Get ready to see Blogger either 1-fix this or 2-lose many, many blogs. Of course, if they were looking to find a way to turn the sploggers away, this may be it. Unfortunately, it’s the real bloggers that will suffer in this…