seabird wrote:
I have a blog at http://myscrapblog.com/techfiddle/ and I'm utterly
confused about what RSS is and what to do with the block of text I get
when I ask for an RSS
I'm looking at http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-rss.htm "What is RSS"
so okay, I get that, but what is that block of text I get:
http://www.myscrapblog.com/rss.php?u=techfiddle
I don't understand what this is, or what to do with it. There is an
RSS feeder button the Suzuki Association page and also on some of the
discussion lists on Yahoo, but I'm at a loss...???
Further, I subscribed to a blog feeder at
http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/webed2.aspx but it won't
accept the URL from my blog. When I click on "Add Feeds" it wants a
URL and I'm not sure what it wants...It says "If you don't know the
feed URL for a weblog or other site, try entering the web page URL.
NewsGator Online can find the feed for you" ...but it lies.
I'm afraid RSS is basically a bag of crud. It was badly-defined,
badly-written, and badly-implemented. People keep on tinkering
with it (including myself) but that doesn't alter the facts. The
replacement (Atom) is vastly better, but RSS has gotten itself
entrenched too early, like HTML did, so we're stuck with it for
a while. The fact that Microsoft have now started using it means
we'll be stuck with this crud for a decade or more, unfortunately.
At its simplest, think of it as a specification for an XML document
representing a list of news items, so what you see at the techfiddle
URI you give above is just such an XML document. Actually, it's
invalid, so it won't work in some feedreaders. Check it with a feed
validator like
http://www.feedvalidator.org/
The objective is that your RSS page should provide a summary of your
site in a form that a feedreader can manage, either to display or to
calculate what has changed since last time.
When newsgator asks for the URI of a feed, give it the techfiddle
one you specify above and see what it does.
///Peter
--
XML FAQ:
http://xml.silmaril.ie/ 
