Feedless
I’ve slowed down on posting regular updates about things you can do with RSS. This is partially because most people who are prone to trying out new technology are already familiar with RSS, and also because there are a host of good sites now devoted to the topic, such as the RSSWeblog. Most new things I find now I post to my del.icio.us “rss” tag which has its own RSS feed. (As does my “feeds”category on Keywords.) But I have two things I wanted to write about today:
First off, you should take a look at this article entitled “Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable.” Even if you are familiar with these services, there are some links to related services and innovative uses of these services you might not be aware of.
Secondly, the announcement of Bob Harris’ new blog reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. I’m a big fan of Bob Harris, having enjoyed his posts on ThisModernWorld.com; however, I won’t be reading his new blog. Why? Because it doesn’t have RSS feeds. As much as I want to make time to check up on web sites individually, if they don’t have feeds I don’t read them. I’ve made a del.icio.us category for such “feedless” blogs, and I’ve tried writing some of the authors asking them to implement feeds. Personally I don’t understand why anyone would use some home-rolled code instead of WordPress, MovableType, Texpattern, or Drupal, all of which are powerful and free. Many of them even work with desktop software such as Ecto which makes posting as easy as writing an e-mail. (Ecto has del.icio.us support, by the way - as well as a Windows version.) And, most importantly, all of them include excellent built-in RSS feed support (as well as other useful features like trackbacks.) But, given that there are people out there who use home-rolled code, does anyone know of any pages I can point them that would help them easily install RSS feeds for their site?
UPDATE: Good news, when I wrote Chris Mooney a year ago he didn’t know what RSS feeds were, but now he has them! This is great because he is one of the most astute observers of science policy in the US and I enjoy his writing.
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Comments
I respect people who like programming themselves and who also implement working feeds (I subscribe to your feed and it works!), but I don’t understand those who aren’t programmers who get some friend to write code for them rather than having that friend install software which already works. This seems to be the case with many of these sites. And really, why can’t George Soros afford to hire a decent web designer?
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An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
My hand-rolled blog is all PHP/MySQL, with just a tiny sprinkling of Perl. The RSS feed is auto-generated, but I still have to do a tiny amount of post processing in BBEdit to make sure it is valid XML, which I plan to bake in to the system via PHP automatically, whenever I can find the time… (ha!) The only reason I wrote it all myself versus using WordPress or Moveable Type is just so I can use it to experiment and teach myself new stuff.