The Haaretz RSS feeds give me the most trouble out of all of my RSS feeds. They have not been working for the last few weeks, since Haaretz implemented site registration. While it occurs to me that I suggested such a move (oops), it makes generating RSS feeds much more difficult (the Perl script would have to use cookies or something).
This may come as a shock to some of you, but I do not, in the immediate future, plan on fixing them. My excuses, in order of reasonableness:
- Haaretz already has Hebrew RSS feeds. If, like me, you cannot read Hebrew, know that I contacted the head of Haaretz's Online Division, Elihay Vidal, who assured me that English-language RSS feeds would be "available soon."
- The scripts that grab the RSS feeds are written in Perl. I do not like Perl, and the idea of modifying a script to deal with Haaretz' online registration system does not really appeal to me.
- I am in a bad mood.
Yes, I fully realize those are stupid excuses:
- How long is "soon?"
- Nobody cares what programming language you use to write the scripts. Use Python if you feel like it.
- Bad moods pass.
Assuming "soon" means longer than two weeks, I will probably get around to modifying the scripts, although the above lists should have made it clear that I am not looking forward to it.