OK, so since I’m trying to add automatic blog functionality, here is a trial RSS feed, added on the miniscule off-chance that someone reading this blog actually uses a news aggregator.

If you are like me then you are probably largely ignorant of the aggregation/syndication side of blogging, but it is an interesting concept: Basically instead of the bad old days where you had a newsreader for reading Usenet groups [and the Usenet groups began to suck because of trolls/spamming etc…] now you get these things called news aggregators which allow you to set up feeds from all your favourite news sites/blogs etc. I’m currently using a free Windows based one called SharpReader, which seems to work fine.

Although it’s not really my role to explain what these things are, since I spent so long wondering why there were all these XML links on people’s pages [with no explanation of what they were for], I thought it might be nice for me to break with tradition and actually point out to the uninitiated what you’re supposed to do with them [it’s like a weird reversal of the old annoying custom that people used to have of putting download links to Netscape and Internet Explorer on their web pages]

How aggregation works:

1. Install a reader (eg SharpReader)
2. Go to your favourite journal style web sites, and look for the link to the RSS feed, usually named something like rss.xml, and often indicated with an icon like the one above.
3. Copy the URL or drag the link into your reader. There is another mechanism where you just click a "subscribe" link but I’m not sure if that’s standard, since none of the sites I visit seem to use it.

Your reader will then periodically scan your various feeds [perhaps hourly] and show you when new articles appear (by changing an icon in the Notification area on the TaskBar). And you hopefully won’t waste quite so much time shuffling around the same 5-10 webpages all day waiting for someone to post something new to read. Your aggregator will show you when something new turns up.

The main problem with aggregation is that if you offer a feed which attracts 1000’s of subscribers, then you will be receiving 1000’s of hits every hour from all their aggregators constantly checking to see if you’ve updated anything, and this may cost bandwidth. Conversely, if you are a user who perversely subscribes to every feed you ever come across, you will also be using tonnes of bandwidth as your aggregator constantly checks for updates. I expect some kind of Google meta-feed system is not far off, where master feeds are generated in real time based on search terms [a bit like GoogleNews ].

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2003 at 11:21 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.