In attempting to create an Atom feed for this site, it’s become apparent that there’s no great way to see what the contents of a feed will look like in a feed reader. Google Reader aggressively caches feed content, making it useless for debugging purposes. I’d like to create a simple web app that takes the URL of a feed, parses it, and displays the content roughly as it will look in a feed reader.
This seems like a good case for a Node.js app written in CoffeeScript. Another alternative is a Ruby app using Sinatra, which would allow me to use a proven feed parsing library like Feedzirra. I’m concerned that most existing libraries are too permissive with regard to malformed feeds, when we’re really attempting to highlight problems.
For version two, we could tie into the W3C feed validator.