After having blogged about manually creating my own MySpace feeds (with complete blog entries instead of this truncated garbage they ship), I've been doing some initial groundwork to see what I'm up against. The results aren't immediately promising.

The approach I want to take is to download a URL such as http://blog.myspace.com/user, use Tidy to fix the HTML errors and output strict XML, and then transmogrify the page into an Atom 1.0 feed using XML transforms. This is extremely straightforward stuff: download, fix, transform.

Well I can download all day, and transforming valid pages is almost childishly easy in my experience...but Tidy barfs on the HTML and fails in a spectacular stream of warnings and errors. Luckily, it's only about 250 separate errors cough. I have to give credit to MySpace for not batting a thousand here.

I'll keep at it, though. In the meantime, I hope you all quit blogging on MySpace! When I next look up, I hope everyone has moved on, thus negating my need to even write this program. Try Blogger, Wordpress.com, or LiveJournal.