Comments on: If You Don’t Have a Syndication Feed …

By: The Indiana Jones School of Management

The Indiana Jones School of Management — Sun, 22 Feb 2004 17:05:51 +0000

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…

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 21:17:55 +0000

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.

By: keith

keith — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 20:57:17 +0000

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)

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 03:05:37 +0000

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.

By: keith

keith — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 23:24:09 +0000

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. )

By: mb

mb — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:16:52 +0000

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.

By: unfinished sketches

unfinished sketches — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 16:29:06 +0000

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 …

By: david

david — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 08:40:15 +0000

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

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 07:35:19 +0000

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.