Earlier this week, I modified the news feed I scrape from Pitchfork to include descriptions of articles. It worked for a day, and then broke when someone on the Pitchfork staff decided that paragraphs should be closed with <p> tags. As you can imagine, this seriously annoyed me, since it meant I had to tweak the code some more.
As a result, I have been keeping a close eye on the Pitchfork feeds. This morning, when I saw that the permalink structure had changed, I groaned and clicked through to the site, even though the feed seemed to be working correctly. While I liked the new fonts, my eyes were instantly drawn to the little orange icon on the left sidebar.
Yes, Pitchfork Media now has official RSS feeds. My scraped feeds are going to ride off into the sunset, so you probably want to direct your feed readers and aggregators to:See the comments section for more details.
- Pitchfork News
- Pitchfork Record Reviews
- Pitchfork Best New Music (Tony Gambone is going to love this)
- Pitchfork Free Downloads
- Pitchfork Track Reviews
- Pitchfork Features
At the time of print, none of the official feeds are valid because they are not actually XML, but broken XHTML pages. I am not entirely sure what is up with that (default error page, perhaps?), but I assume that the problem will be fixed soon. I am also not sure whether the new feeds have anything to do with the addition of I ♥ Squares to Pitchfork's footer, but I surmise that they might.
# At 11:41 on June 15, 2006, Tony Gambone wrote:
Heh. It's better this way.
They must have realized there was a problem... I don't even see those feeds... all I see is the 'Today' feed (which works) on any page. They'll probably get things ironed out soon.
# At 11:46 on June 15, 2006, Martey wrote:
Considering that the "Today" feed was not working properly as I was writing the post, I think that they are making progress.
# At 11:50 on June 15, 2006, Chris Kampmeier wrote:
I have a sneaking suspicion that they just switched to Rails. Hopefully he (iheartsquares) fixes the feeds soon.
# At 12:44 on June 15, 2006, Marijn wrote:
I'm getting errors at the moment. I guess they're still tweaking.
# At 12:52 on June 15, 2006, shane wrote:
None of them are working for me...
# At 12:54 on June 15, 2006, Daveed wrote:
Hey, thanks for taking up their rss slack for so long! I appreciated the work!
# At 13:50 on June 15, 2006, Jason wrote:
Now all references to any XML and the coding have been removed.
# At 13:55 on June 15, 2006, Martey wrote:
Yeah, even the I ♥ Squares notice is gone. It is like they reverted the website to a previous version. I really hope that the official feeds come back.
# At 14:53 on June 15, 2006, ben wrote:
hey -- thanks for keeping up the RSS all this time. it's been awesome. looks like the 'official' one is dead now. will you put it back up if pitchfork decides they're not competent enough to do it themselves? :)
# At 14:56 on June 15, 2006, Martey wrote:
Yes, although I will not be happy about it. If it is not up by sometime tomorrow, I (or rather my Perl script) will return to scraping.
# At 17:41 on June 15, 2006, Sam wrote:
Thanks for hosting the scraped feeds, Martey! Welcome to 2003, Pitchfork.
# At 23:14 on June 15, 2006, James wrote:
hey hey, once again thanks for this feed, y'know
# At 8:06 on June 16, 2006, Brian wrote:
The links open to a 404 message. I've never seen the pitchfork 404 message before...it's just a white screen with the number "404" on it. Classic and simple!
# At 9:39 on June 16, 2006, Ben wrote:
Okay, here's a weird one — up until yesterday, I had Pitchfork headlines set up in my "My Yahoo" home page. Today, all the Pitchfork headlines are gone, replaced with one link — to this page (which I've never read before). KOOKY.
# At 9:55 on June 16, 2006, Ben wrote:
Yes, I'm replying to my own comment. Having never visited here before, i decided to read some of your other posts — particularly, the "Thoughts on Flock" one. Given what I just wrote about being sent here via my apparently-screwey My Yahoo page, I had to laugh at your "Yahoo never sends anyone here" part of that post. In this case, Yahoo DID send someone here...albeit by mistake. Huzzah!
# At 17:38 on June 16, 2006, Martey wrote:
Unfortunately, I cannot thank Yahoo! for sending you here, since it was actually me - I edited all of the Pitchfork feeds to redirect here in order to notify people that official feeds were now available, and that this feed was ending.
However, since the official feeds have disappeared and Ryan Schreiber has not responded to my email, I have turned my feeds back on. They are available at: