RSS in Outlook 2007 with Blogger based blogs

Slightly technical article here, but I post it just in case anyone else has been getting infuriated by the same thing I have been infuriated by.

You find a nice new blog written and hosted by blogger. Say Jam’s new blog, Best of Both Worlds. You decide to subscribe to his feed. In Firefox, you click on the little RSS icon in the address bar, and get taken to his feed page. This is http://jamescary.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

You then go to Outlook 2007, and add this as a new RSS feed. His posts start to populate the folder, so you can read at your leisure. But annoyingly, every post has a date of 31st December 2006.

So what, you say. No big deal, until he has 300 posts in that folder. He makes a new post, but it doesn’t appear at the top, because (all posts having the same date) there’s no reason why it should. So you have to hunt up and down the 300 posts to find the one that is unread.

Grrr

Now this may not be a problem in other RSS readers – it could be an Outlook 2007 bug.

But, even so, there’s a simple workaround. Instead of using http://jamescary.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default as the feed use http://jamescary.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Don’t ask me why that makes a difference, but it seems to make all the difference. Hurrah!

Just in case anyone else is helped…