Racing on Rails

Some good and some bad news to report today. Let's start with the bad news: Yes, the RSS and Atom feeds for this blog are, in a word, fook'd. Not sure what the problem is exactly, but I am not the only person experiencing this. I've spent some time this afternoon looking it over and fixed it on my development MacBook, but apparently the bug has much foo, because it didn't fix the server (which you are looking at). After a little bit more hacking, I think I have root caused this at not having swig installed on the server at install / migration / posting time (which was not stated in the docos). Anyway, I have it there now and am thinking about how I correct the problem. On the good news side of the slate, I fixed (and tested the crap out of) the mtbcalendar.com feeds. You can now follow these feeds:

• New events: new events added or updated on the calendar. These are available at http://www.mtbcalendar.com/feeds/index.rss (RSS 2.0) or http://www.mtbcalendar.com/feeds/index.atom (Atom).
• Upcoming events: The next two events on the calendar. These are available at http://www.mtbcalendar.com/feeds/upcoming.rss (RSS) or http://www.mtbcalendar.com/feeds/upcoming.atom (Atom).
• State: This is a bit more complicated but far more valuable feed. This lists the upcoming events FOR YOUR STATE. This requires a bit of knowledge and work on your part. Until I get the link onto the web page, you need to create your own url in the form of http://www.mtbcalendar.com/feeds/state/[YOUR TWO LETTER STATE ABBREVIATION IN LOWER CASE].rss, like http://www.mtbcalendar.com/feeds/state/ca.rss for California (also available in Atom format). This should work for all fifty US states and most of Canada's provinces, but I am unsure how this will work outside there. I am basically beholden to Google's geocoder here and I have already seen Baja, Mexico come up weird. We'll just have to play it by ear on those.

I will have more feeds finished this week. They are:

• Tag: a feed for any tag on the site, such as norcal or socal.
• Format: a feed for specific types of racing like cross country (XC) or downhill (DH).

I'll drop a line when I get these done.