xml Sitemap feed

[Dennis_Gull]

Hello,
I'm working on a feed for a website and I want it to follow the xml sitemap protocol so that the search engines will be able to crawl it better. The problem is I want to display descriptions in the feed but im not sure this is allowed if you follow this method: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php
So should I just create a normal rss and sumit that one as my sitemap or should I create one Sitemap to google and one normal rss to the site? :)
This feed is very important for this project because Im working in flex (flash) and I want the search engines to see whats in the database.

// Dennis

[Medyman]

So should I just create a normal rss and sumit that one as my sitemap or should I create one Sitemap to google and one normal rss to the site

I would do the latter. Submit a sitemap to Google. Do a traditional RSS feed for the rest. The sitemap protocol isn't generally targeted at content syndication.

At best, what you could do is to have both. A simple feed with titles only and a more comprehensive standard RSS feed with the descriptions included. Let your users choose which ones they want.

[Dennis_Gull]

Now I created one rss feed for users and search engines and one sitemap only for search engines but I still have one question and one problem.
First of all i just wondering if its better to use a XSLT Transformation on the sitemap or is it only useful if you want real people to view them (not bots)

My problem is the encoding of the rss feed.
If I select the Russian feed I will have to use UTF-8 but then I will get an error message in IE saying something like:
"Couldn't display the feed, we found an invalid character at line ..."

And in firefox I will get weird characters that you can find in the attached image.

One example where I get those weird characters is when I use the euro symbol, is there a solution to this?

[Medyman]

XSLT is meant specifically for making XML data "human readable". So, if users won't be seeing it, I don't see a benefit in going to the trouble.

As for the encoding issues, I really don't know. Try validating the file (http://feedvalidator.org). See if that turns up anything.

Otherwise, do you have a link to the RSS feed? Or it's source?

[Dennis_Gull]

XSLT is meant specifically for making XML data "human readable". So, if users won't be seeing it, I don't see a benefit in going to the trouble.

As for the encoding issues, I really don't know. Try validating the file (http://feedvalidator.org). See if that turns up anything.

Otherwise, do you have a link to the RSS feed? Or it's source?

I validated it at w3c and It says its valid although they give me 185 recommendations like this:
"<mytag> contains bad characters"

and if I click "help" I get this page:
http://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/warning/BadCharacters.html

[Medyman]

How are you setting your character encoding? Is the feed dynamically generated? Or are you hand writing it? If hand writing, have you checked the output settings? S

[Dennis_Gull]

How are you setting your character encoding? Is the feed dynamically generated? Or are you hand writing it? If hand writing, have you checked the output settings? S

Its dynamic generated and the beginning looks like this:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'?>
<rss version='2.0' xmlns:atom='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<channel>
<title>my title</title>
<link>...

This will work for the English version but the Russian wont even display it and if I change it to UTF-8 I will get those weird characters, two of the recommendations I get from w3c is:
0x94 = RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
0x9D = UNDEFINED

[Dennis_Gull]

I fixed it by adding:

$encoding = "UTF-8";
iconv("$encoding","$encoding//IGNORE",$xml);