Wednesday, March 31, 2004

RSS Feed

New site feature alert for all of you nerds out there! As of today I’ve started an RSS feed for this site. For those that are so inclined to know what this means read on. If you don’t care, skip down a little ways because this will be boring. Anyhow, an RSS feed is basically an XML file hosted on my site that keeps track of my most recent posts. When I add a new post the XML file is updated and if you have an RSS aggregator (there’s tons of them out there) it will grab the newest headline and alert you there is a new post. This way you don’t constantly have to check back to my site to see if there’s a new update. I’m sure there are so many of you that are constantly refreshing this page just to see if anything new has popped up J

Right now on my desktop I have an RSS aggregator that works like a stock ticker across the top of my screen. I’m subscribed to about 20 different RSS feeds so whenever there are new stories or breaking news information, I have it scrolling across the top of my screen. No more checking the BBC or Slashdot constantly to see what’s new. Now when a story hits, as soon as my aggregator grabs the XML files for the RSS feed, it shoots the new story into rotation.

I find that this is nice for blogs as well. Some that I read are updated more than once a day while some are updated less than daily. Since I am subscribed to their RSS feed, whenever a new post gets made, whenever it might be, I’ll know about it. If there’s nothing new, I don’t have to worry about checking out their site only to be greeted by the same story or post I’ve already read. So for any of you geeks out there who read this and don’t already use an RSS aggregator, go find one (use Google to help you out), and subscribe to my RSS feed. My feed is at the bottom of the page. It’s the little red RSS graphic.

Now that I’ve gotten my latest bit of dork out of my system, I’m free to move on to other non-geek related subjects. Well, actually, I don’t have a lot of time to delve into anything else at the moment so all of you readers that aren’t geeks kind of got shafted today. Sorry.

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