Building a better RSS Feed

Like most people, I rarely actually visit blogs any more. I just go visit my bloglines. Well, recently I noticed the feed for this web site was insufficiently cool. The text had no paragrahs, no images, it was just terrible.

Thus I waded into the mine field of RSS formats. I read Mark Pilgrim, so I should have known it would be frustrating. I think I have an RSS 2.0 format that works: at least the Updated dates seems to make sense (ie, they are today) and I have paragraphs now. Frustratingly, there was no way I could make Bloglines go get a fresh copy, so I just had to wait. (I'm still working on the RSS 1.0 feed.) Suggestions on the format are more than welcome.

Then I discovered that if I wanted to prove to the technorati folks that I existed, I had to add javascript to my site and then ping them. Which this post will do, now that I've added them to my ping list.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Wednesday, July 7, 2004 (Link)

Comments

Posted by Shannon Friday, July 9, 2004 at 11:35 AM

For RSS feeds, I really like FeedReader. It's free, it can be set up to automatically check for new feeds, and it comes pre-set with about a zillion news feeds that I promtly deleted. Well, most of them I deleted, anyway.

http://www.feedreader.com/

Works great, unless you aren't using windows.

Just listen to me, I sound like a commercial!

Posted by Chad Lundgren Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 01:39 PM

When you ask it to update, FeedReader pops up many little windows with headlines, beeping for each one, and then gradually closing them. Not my cup of tea.

Plus, bloglines now allows renaming of feeds, so I can shorten them so that I can leave the the right hand content area wide enough for the Sunday Dilbert. This was my only real complaint with bloglines.