Our company hosts one of my favorite web comics CommissionedComic.com. It’s very nerdy fare full of inside geek jokes and D&D themes. It’s also very funny and I read it daily. I got a an IM from Obsidian, the comic’s artist early today asking me to look at his RSS code because some of his readers were having trouble with the feed. I subscribed to it and everything worked fine, then took a look at the generating PHP and it seemed to be working perfectly as well.
We’ve decided to keep the “problem” whichever it might be, unsolved for now and get some more feedback from users.
My best guess is that the feed is having trouble in a couple of specific RSS readers but is generally working fine. I guess the first clue is that out of 13,000 daily readers only a few are having trouble and most seem happy with how everything works.
These sorts of compatibility issues are the bane of the web-developer’s existence. Sure when it comes to sites we’re pretty much used to it and we’ve created workarounds, found loopholes and installed legacy browsers for testing, but the same sorts of issues keep cropping up and in starker contrast when it comes to HTML e-mails and apparently now RSS.
It really is a difficult position to be in and in general as developers we do everything we can to make our code standards compliant and take into consideration the limitations of our users’ tools but it becomes practically impossible to test in every possible environment. That’s how you get to the situation we’re at right now, waiting for complaints. We’ve already tested out the wazoo in 5 different OSes, 12 different browsers, 8 e-mail clients and 5 RSS readers, but now we have to wait for the fails, the errors, the complaints to pop up in regular usage. Reminds me a lot of this:
There’s no way of knowing that someone’s going to get orange juice in the face until they try to drink some(watch the video, seriously). This approach isn’t only necessary but it is almost impossible to do it any other way, and you’d be surprised at the amount of user recomendations that go far beyond simple bug-reporting, and turn into solid recomendations that make the website experience so much better.
I guess that’s the note I’m happy to end this post in. Here’s to our users, our greatest critics, fans, and unwitting beta-testers. Without you we’d be just as mediocre as everyone else.
