I’m just a casual user who doesn’t do RSS reader development, but over the last few months I’ve been coming to the conclusion that RSS parsing is WAY harder than I had thought. I had heard that Google Reader was shut down because the code base was effectively unmaintainable after the original developers went elsewhere, and I now have a strong suspicion that part of the reason was probably the enormous number of special cases it had. After seeing how many of the replacement readers have struggled to get all of the same feeds working, it has started to seem like an enormous accomplishment on their part, that they made so many broken feeds “just work” for the rest of us. I think we have all been well and truly spoiled, and are only now realizing it.
And so Samuel Clay, thank you for all your work! NewsBlur rocks!