Markdown Discuss - Jun 2007 - Blosxom + Markdown problem: randomised email links break RSS, Atom

As described here, "Markdown will... perform a bit of randomized
decimal and hex entity-encoding to help obscure your address from
address-harvesting spambots" on automatic email address links like
<rwhe at ludism.org>.

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#autolink

I have had a problem with my RSS feed for months, where certain
entries would refresh every hour or so. (I mentioned it earlier on the
Blosxom list but received no responses.) Updating all my plugins and
deleting suspicious ones didn't help. On the supposition that the RSS
feed built into Blosxom was broken, I added an Atom feed to my blog
and asked my subscribers to switch to that. It seemed to work for a
few days, but then the Atom feed started experiencing the same problem
with the same three posts, although the feed didn't seem to refresh as
frequently.

I finally printed out all three problem posts and several non-problem
posts as controls. All of the problem posts contained my address in
angle-bracket form: <rwhe at ludism.org>. None of the control posts did.

I grepped the content tree for my blog. The problem posts were the
_only_ ones that contained my address in this form. Apparently the
random entity-encoding generated by Blosxom kept changing and causing
these entries to reappear in my feeds.

I deleted the angle brackets around my address in those posts. I'm
going to keep my eye on my feeds for a while before I announce the
problem has finally been fixed. Meanwhile, nearly all of my
subscribers have vamoosed in annoyance, as far as I can tell.

I can't believe no one else has experienced this problem before, but I
can't find any previous reference to it. Does anyone have any comments
on this problem? Is it likely to be fixed?

Thanks,

Ron Hale-Evans

-- 
    Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe at ludism.org ... http://ron.ludism.org/
Mind Performance Hacks book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mindperfhks/
	   Center for Ludic Synergy: http://www.ludism.org/
(revilous life proving aye the death of ronaldses when winpower wine has
		   bucked the kick on poor won man)

On 6/13/07, Kevin Scaldeferri <kevin at scaldeferri.com>
wrote:
>
> On Jun 9, 2007, at 12:26 PM, Ron Hale-Evans wrote:
>
> > As described here, "Markdown will... perform a bit of randomized
> > decimal and hex entity-encoding to help obscure your address from
> > address-harvesting spambots" on automatic email address links
like
> > <rwhe at ludism.org>.
> > ...
> > I grepped the content tree for my blog. The problem posts were the
> > _only_ ones that contained my address in this form. Apparently the
> > random entity-encoding generated by Blosxom kept changing and causing
> > these entries to reappear in my feeds.
> >
> > ...
> >
> > I can't believe no one else has experienced this problem before,
but I
> > can't find any previous reference to it. Does anyone have any
comments
> > on this problem? Is it likely to be fixed?
>
> Since you cross-posted, it's not clear to me who you are expecting to
> "fix" this.  It doesn't seem like a problem in Blosxom,
though.  The
> content of your posts is changing, readers see that and mark the
> changed content as new again.  I can see that from your point of view
> this is a mis-feature of markdown, but it doesn't seem that blosxom
> could do anything to help you here.
First, I'm glad you answered, Kevin. Thank you. Second, it strikes me
that this is a Blosxom/Markdown incompatibility, and therefore a
problem for _both_ the Blosxom and Markdown developer communities. If
no one wants to fix (or "fix") it, it should at least be documented. I
am a technical writer by trade and will be happy to document the
problem if someone will point me to the documentation leads for both
projects.

Ron H-E

-- 
    Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe at ludism.org ... http://ron.ludism.org/
Mind Performance Hacks book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mindperfhks/
	   Center for Ludic Synergy: http://www.ludism.org/
(revilous life proving aye the death of ronaldses when winpower wine has
		   bucked the kick on poor won man)