09/09/2005: "New Feature: RSS Feed"

listening to: Nothing, yet...okay, now CSI in the background. ;-)
feeling: Good.

OKay, so not that many of you will care, but I've added RSS Feeds to this blog. If you look to the right, under the Get Around links, there is a Build RSS link and a View RSS link. If you are authoring an entry, and you are done, you can click the Build RSS link and it will execute a small PHP script that builds an RSS Feed of the 15 most recent entries in the site.

What is RSS? Well, depending on who you ask, it's an acronym that stands for a variety of things, but most people say it stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a standard that reformats the content in a site as XML, so that can be read by a system that reinterprets it and reformats it. Most people use this to aggregate news feeds, blogs, etc, into a program called a RSS Reader and read the most pertinent articles on their favorite topic, in a specified time period, or by a specific author. I, for example, read all the RSS feeds from Wired Magazine that are categorized as Mac entries.

So, what is the point of adding RSS to this site? Well, mostly it was to do it at all. I had to edit the PHP, which is good to know, I had to install things on my server, which is good practice, and I had to familiarize myself with the process of generating the XML in general. The other 10% was so that people like Wes, Dáv, and our other techno-savvy buddies can add the RSS to their reader and read about Mabel learning to swim along with their stock quotes, virus alerts, and sports scores.