Fuddland

I’ve finally gotten round to creating the RSS 2.0 feeds for the Moblog and Bugblog — it took me all of three minutes to copy over the template and alter a couple of things, so I don’t know why it’s taken me until now to do. Perhaps it’s because I don’t actually know if anyone even subscribes to the Weblog feed, so adding these other two might well have been an exercise in futility. But they’re there anyway. [The links are on the front page.]

If the above makes no sense to you, then you’ve probably not heard of weblog syndication and aggregators — either that or I was hit on the head during the night and I now have some kind of disorder whereby I’m typing complete gibberish that only I can convert back into English. That second possibility being fairly remote: providing an RSS feed means that people can read my new entries without actually having to visit my site on the off-chance I’ve posted something since the last time they checked. Their aggregator programme checks the feed every few hours; if there are no changes it does nothing; if there is new content it alerts the user to this fact and they can read at their leisure, from within the aggregator, which usually presents the text in a pretty plain way. It makes keeping track of a large number of weblogs fairly simple. I don’t know which aggregators are considered the best, or what the differences between them are, but you’d need one that supports RSS 2.0 to subscribe to my feeds, so that should obviously be your primary criterion when selecting one.

I’ve also remembered to set the preferences to start pinging the usual places [blo.gs, Weblogs.Com, BlogRolling, Technorati] when the Moblog or Bugblog get updated, as I already do when I post to the Weblog, to let people who use these services know when there’s a new entry. Pinging is different from aggregation in that the service does not download any content — it simply knows there is something new, and the user then has to visit the site to read it.

I use blo.gs myself, to the point where I tend to forget that not everybody on my blogroll sends a ping when they update their weblog — if you’ve noticed my visits dropping off of late, that’s why — don’t take it personally. [If you don’t ping blo.gs or any of the others, why the heck not? It’s very helpful.] I prefer to visit the proper site rather than using an aggregator, because some people have made a real effort with their designs and it seems a shame to never look at them.

#1

bsag | 2004 / 01 / 28 – 12:11

I subscribe to your feed! I tend to use feeds as a way of seeing if there is new content, but I usually do visit the site itself, because I like to see the design. I sometimes read the first few lines of the entry of the feed in the aggregator to see if it’s worth visiting the site, [smarm] but of course all entries are worth reading on fuddland [/smarm].

#2

Gordon | 2004 / 01 / 28 – 12:23

I use RSS feeds sometimes… it’s a love hate thing.

As for ‘pinging’ sites - some of us use Blogger and so can only ping weblog.com, if I could ping elsewhere I WOULD!

#3

David | 2004 / 01 / 28 – 12:48

Re #1: Hooray — so it’s not all in vain. Excellent smarming there by the way, full marks. ;)

Re #2: It’s okay, blo.gs monitors Blogger’s own changes file, so there’s no need to ping them yourself. :)

#4

Phil | 2004 / 01 / 28 – 19:38

One of these days I’ll get around to finding out just what an RSS feed is, how it works, and why anyone would want one.

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