- Are You Well Fed?
- Blogged on Friday 20th May 2005 at 10:10:01 PM by David
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I know that I said that I'm done with ASP and this version of the blog code, however Jona mentioned the other day that I didn't have a feed. Also, Ben has been pestering me about getting one for a while. So today I asked Phil what he thought on the matter and whether it would be worth making one. Unfortunately he said yes, which didn't leave me with very much wiggle room.
So around 5PM I sat down at my desk and tortured google until it told me what the hell an RSS feed was. After approximately one search I found this which explained about the different versions. After reading most of the article I decided than an RSS 2.0 feed would be the way to go.
Back to google and I searched for the RSS 2.0 specification which is located precisely here. After completely reading through the specification, twice, I felt confident enough to write out a feed by hand, which I did. Then I validated it to make sure all was good.
By this time it was probably around 5:30 and I needed to automate the writing of the feed instead of doing it by hand. Back to my ASP book to read about how to write to files, then I started writing out some code. I was part way through this when I had to take a break, tea time don't you know.
When I came back I finished off writing the function to write the feed and it worked like a charm. And there you have it, how to go from knowing nothing about RSS to writing and integrating RSS feed creation code into a dead blog in little over one and a half hours.
I'm feeling quite chuffed with myself now. Also, I was thinking about including a few other feeds into the blog aswell, Atom and RSS 0.91 perhaps. But before I do that, what does everyone else think? Remember, Phil and co. over at q-staircase are going to be using this blog for at least a while yet as their host doesn't support PHP.
Edit: I should probably mention to those like me who don't know much about RSS feeds, to take advantage of them you need an RSS reader such as Sage.
Woo woo! Of course, you DO tell me every update anyways, so a recent comments feed would be quite nice. Oh, btw, just do one RSS, and one Atom. I likes me some Atom, myself, because it allows a lot more info... (well, RSS 0.91 seems ideal for links, 2.0 for comments, and Atom 0.3 for entries... but I just have 0.91 and 0.3 for everything, Anne said RSS 2.0 is bad so I go with that). Meh. This one feed is fine for AP... wait for Fog to worry about multiples.
Oh, yeah, actually, just look into Feed Burner.
Hmm, "You must not use RSS 2.0, since it has big problems." It'd be nice to know just what the problems are. From just reading the RSS 2.0 specification it seems fine, everything is taken care of.
Yeah... I wish she was more specific, too, but... eh. Her site's low profile. E-mail/Contact/Whatever her. No, not that "whatever," you sick fuck.
OK, I've renamed the original feed from "rss2.xml" to "rss2entries.xml" and I've also added a new feed named "rss2comments.xml".
rss2entries will be updated every time that there is a new blog entry and rss2comments will be updated every time there is a new comment.
Hopefully these should let people know when there's some new activity on the site. Lately I've made a few blogs in quick succession but the comments have been few and far between.
Well, I've just added two more feeds, this time for RSS 0.91, rss091entries.xml and rss091comments.xml. I was looking into adding RSS 1.0 but I didn't for a couple of reasons.
Although the XML for RSS 1.0 is similar to that of 0.91 and 2.0, it differs in enough ways that it would need it's own function to create it and I just can't be bothered with that. Besides, I think I'll be safe with just 0.91 and 2.0, most readers should be able to handle those.
Way to go, Dave! Thanks. Now I don't have to remember to visit your site every day (something I didn't do anyway, but if I did, I would have to... if that made any sense).
However you do need to remember not to use character entities in your posts.