PubSub Sandbox

We’ve updated the ping server to actually send out UTF-8 characters instead of using xml entity escaping for those characters. This may make it slightly more difficult to test from telnet, but (as several people pointed out) it’s the correct thing to do.

After that, we still need to escape a couple of characters in attribute values: &, <, > and ". We escape these using xml entity codes. All in all it should be a lot cleaner. We’ve been running a test program against it for about 10,000 records (30 minutes) with no discernible errors.

Thanks to Ben Hyde for the note, and for the testing.

If you’d like to try it out, connect to sandbox.pubsub.com on port 9999. There’s a handy test program on blo.gs if you’ve got php5/cli.