If You Don’t Have a Syndication Feed …

… I just don’t follow you anymore.

Sorry.

I just like my syn-feeds too much. It makes it easy. It manages the slew of links for me.

I’ve advocated FeedDemon before, and while it’s a great program, I’m currently grokking Feed on Feeds. I like having it on the server. I consume feeds both at work and at home; since there aren’t any work-specific feeds, it makes sense to have them all on one box.

I don’t regret the FeedDemon purchase one bit; I might even start using it again.

But again … if you don’t have syndication, chances are I’m not following you much anymore, despite me perhaps wanting to do so.

Sorry.

Posted February 12th, 2004 in Fooftatsic, Geekery by Geof F. Morris.

9 comments:

  1. Alex:

    Hmm, sounds familiar. ;)

    Syndication is the “next big thing”. I forget where (tried to find it) but I’ll paraphrase the best summation I’ve seen:

    If you think you can’t follow 100 or more web sites on a daily basis, your vision is limited by your toolset.

  2. david:

    maybe you’ll have to explain this to me, too. ;)

  3. unfinished sketches:

    RSS feeds
    Okay, so I’ve been hearing about this forever now…but I’d never taken initiative to get a program, or to even really check out this world of RSS syndication, until yesterday. I figure, if Geof held it in such high regard…I should check this …

  4. mb:

    I’ve only been playing around with it the last couple of days and it’s like my new crack, and I agree about sites that don’t have RSS feeds. Sites that don’t have RSS feeds make baby Jesus cry. :-) Now if Blogger could just join the craze then a number of people who are bookmarked as “friends” could be added and my list of non-RSS feed sites would be almost nil. I should have around 40+ if not 50, or so feeds being watched by sometime today.

  5. keith:

    That’s great. So, uh, for all you’ve said about these syndication feeds, Geof, I’ve never once seen you actually say what they are. So, what’s it and why do I needs it?
    (hey, I trusted you on Trillian and Firebird/Firefox, and you were dead right on both counts. So gimme a little english here and I just may trust you on this one, too. :) )

  6. Geof F. Morris:

    Keith:

    A couple links:

    http://rss.lockergnome.com/resources/articles/q-and-a.phtml

    http://rss.lockergnome.com/resources/articles/quickstart.phtml

    [Those are RSS-specific; RSS is the predominant syndication format of today, but it probably won't be in three years. But unlike tapes and CD's, most aggregators read both RSS and Atom--or soon will.]

    A syndication feed exports the content of a Web site into a stripped-down format that tells you when, where, and what was posted. For example, when I read your Weblog just now, I first read the RSS feed. That indicated that you had written something that I hadn’t read before. When I scanned the first few bits of the content, I realized, “I want to read this, and probably comment on it,” so I clicked on through.

    In short, I skimmed at least half of your latest post without ever pulling up your Web site. In the very same window where I saw new content from you, I could have seen new content from any number of other sites. Only stuff I haven’t read before is presented to me.

    Rather than me have to go around and play the “have I read this?” game, the aggregator pulls it all together for me and puts it all in a nice, neat package.

  7. keith:

    Sounds pretty cool. That’s kinda what it seemed like you were talking about.

    Soo every time I fix a little typo in my blog or tweak my as-of-yet-unfixed title, I have you looking over my shoulder? (Which is pretty often. I’m a little obsessive compulsive about that kind of thing)

  8. Geof F. Morris:

    Well, not really. The way WP publishes an RSS feed [dynamically], it’ll only show an update when a new post is made. It will change the feed data, though.

  9. The Indiana Jones School of Management:

    Need For Consumption
    Now, you know that I really only follow stuff with syndication feeds nowadays. I just have too many other things I like to do on the Web [and offline] to check through a bunch of links [even though I give you most everything in my feed-list over in yo…

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