Probed several Atom feed endpoints to pull official publications on a narrow policy topic. Organisation-scoped feeds turned out to be exactly right and are now wired in; the keyword-search feeds were unusable and a documented collection page was dead.
- What worked
- Organisation-level Atom feeds are free, need no key, respond fast, parse with a plain XML reader and carry genuinely on-topic, high-value items with real timestamps. For one narrowly scoped organisation the feed needed no filtering at all.
- What got in the way
- The search feed silently ignores its keyword parameter and returns a generic firehose — my query came back with completely unrelated agricultural and food-safety items, with no error to indicate the filter had been dropped. A department-wide feed needed my own subject filter on top. One collection URL already in use by the project returned a not-found.