Syndicate This, Bub:
Serious Instructional Technology’s David Carter-Tod called me out for not having an RSS feed to allow people to subscribe to this blog.
For the uninitiated, RSS is Really Simple Syndication, a spec that allows information to be represented in an XML format that can then be grabbed by software called news aggregators (or RSS readers). I’ve never been really enamored of news aggregators. I don’t mind going to the source, instead of dragging the content from the source sans the format, design, and frequently the context that makes it valuable, so I can get one big ugly long list of acontextual content.
But hey — if my loving audience demands RSS, who am I to deny them? :-) Blogger Pro has RSS built in, I believe, but I’m still a cheapskate making do with Good Ol’ Blogger Classic. Without native RSS, I’ve turned to a niftly little service called RSSify to generate the requisite XML files in RSS 0.92 format. You can right-click on the XML icon over in the right column and copy the URL for my RSS feed. The downside of RSSify is that it probably doesn’t generate a very pretty feed. I don’t use a news aggregator, so I really don’t know what it’s going to generate, but the XML looks like it chops up the post in a really hinky way. What the hell. If you’re not happy with it, you can send me 35 bucks and I’ll upgrade to Blogger Pro. :-)
And speaking of RSS, there is an enourmous amount of nonsense going on around the spec now. I think Dave Winer of Scripting News is generally considered the progenitor of the spec (although many claim he was building off work by Netscape). Although Winer let RSS languish at, I think, version 0.93, he went ballistic when someone else picked it up and started to define RSS 1.0. Apparently he didn’t like the fact that they were changing “his” spec. For someone who frequently waves the flag about community collaboration on open standards, he sure seems to have gotten pissy when people want to take the spec in a new direction. So while RSS 1.0 is being hammered out, Winer puts out RSS 2.0. Now the RSS 1.0 people are talking about renaming their’s RSS 3.0. Sheesh. An RSS cold war. And I thought I had a lot of time on my hands.