As Far As I Can Tell

The Sea is Full

I’ve recently discovered the wonder of RSS powered newsfeed aggregators. While that might sounds complicated if you haven’t heard of them, it’s really pretty easy. RSS is an XML standard that allows people to syndicate their news/weblog content. A reader, or aggregator, checks out these files every so often and tells you when things are updated. Beyond that, lots of feeds let you read the content directly in the program without launching a browser at all. This lets you stay on top of weblog updates without spending all day checking the site over and over again.

For Mac folks there’s NetNewsWire and for Widows I recommend Syndirella. Both are free and easy to use. Plus, lots of people have RSS feeds without even knowing it. Nearly all popular weblog packages automatically set it up. For example, anyone who is using Live Journal or Moveable Type probably already has a feed.

If someone is using Movable Type their feed is probably named index.rdf, index.rss, or index.xml. Examples I found from people who probably don’t even know they were publishing one are Ivo, Miguel, and Meredith. For Live Journal the file is located like this: http://www.livejournal.com/users/joshdahl/rss/. Everyone who uses their service automatically has a feed in the rss directory off of their account.

Mine is located right here, and includes the full content of the posts.

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Yesterday I tried to go to a release party for the new Sea and Cake album at the Hideout. It was advertised as a free event to listen to the new CD, but word on the street said they were playing live by surprise. I guess everyone else knew that too because when I showed up right on time it was already sold out.

View Comments (7)

# January 21, 2003 11:11 PM


 

Comments

yes I have a friends list feed, but I’ve been told that if I get a paid accound I can add non LJ logs to this list; perhaps this is away around having to pay and still being able to see my other friends log entries

Posted by: bil on January 22, 2003 11:10 AM

I later found out we were not “right on time.” The doors opened at 7:00 pm, show started at 10:00 pm. Neither the Hideout website or Thrill Jockey website stated this clearly.

Posted by: ivo on January 22, 2003 11:13 AM

yeah, i knew about the rss thing on my weblog. i took the link out because i don’t know of anyone who’d want to syndicate my content. but if you want to set up a syndicate page for people you know, feel free to include my weblog. another great thing about rss is that it basically makes bloggers into worldwide journalists. several political and current events weblogs operate this way. they post independently from around the world and many of them do a really good job of checking sources, doing research, etc. then they’re syndicated and spread around by other bloggers. imagine an international online newspaper that has no central “editor” but lots of journalists working through a cooperative “associated press newswire”. that’s my experience w/ the power of rss. this so-called “blogosphere” has been credited by some major newspapers of breaking stories (such as the recent trent lott issue, most of that was carried on the shoulders of weblogs). many journalists now read weblots (and also write them) as standard daily routine when checking their “beat”.

Posted by: miguel on January 22, 2003 12:49 PM

Does this in any way mean that I am famous?

Posted by: meredith on January 22, 2003 7:26 PM

P.S. nice title.

Posted by: meredith on January 22, 2003 7:27 PM

As soon as you advertised that you had switched to MT as your cms, I looked (and found) your feed. There are a lot of sites out there with an unkinked feed. The nice thing with NNW and a few others is RSS auto-discovery. You can give NNW a URL and if the author supplied the correct metadata tag, it will add the feed to your opml file. Now you need to include the comments in your feed.

Posted by: Adam on January 22, 2003 11:29 PM

Yeah, I discovered that Syndirella will read in that meta tag too. It also checks Syndic8.com to see if there is a feed. Good idea about the comments. I might add those when I the time. By the way, what Adam is this? Your domain seems to be unregistered according to netsol.com.

Posted by: simon on January 22, 2003 11:45 PM

As far as who can tell?


Chicago, IL

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