Feed the many

Blogger, which I use to publish this thing, offers RSS feeds. Of course - google's a big fan of Atom, after all.

But they've never worked. After discovering that somebody else had managed to get it working by total accident, this offended me too much, and I determined to fix it.

In case you don't know, RSS means "Really simple syndication". It's a wonderful invention that allows you to get information from all over the web, and aggregate it in one place. It mostly consists of a heading and a small amount of text - ideal for blog articles, really.

I first started using RSS feeds in Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature - this is dead handy, any page offering a feed, you just add that feed to your bookmarks, and you get a new bookmark folder with links to all the most recent stories.

But it had drawbacks, so I came up with a new & cunning plan: I put an aggregator on my web page, and it now shows me all the stories from all the web pages I visit, along with the first line of said story. Here's a sample:

This is my default page. Keeps me current with all my fave sites without me having to keep looking at them to see if anything new & interesting has been added.

So I found my problem (I had given the FTP client the full pathname, forgetting that my blog FTP settings start at the "blog/" subdirectory. Fixed that, and *boom*, working RSS feeds. I could now add my own site feed to my web page, but what would be the point of that?

Well. . . actually, I suppose it might look quite nice. . . :o)

If you want to subscribe to my feed, the link is http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/blog/atom.xml

Or just use the little icon in the bottom right corner of Firefox to add it to your live bookmarks, of course. .