Now that I’m movabletyped up I’ve decided to gather some more understanding about the world of RSS (RDF Site Summary I believe, though I saw someone else refer to it as Really Simple Syndication which is a nice way of looking at it). Oh, and the fact that dan sumption said he’d now been able to grab the RSS feed from my site and I wonder how it actually looked!
With a little reading I decided to grab a copy of the freeware FeedReader program. A small download, a quick install, and once I’d opened up the program I just put in the rdf location for this here site ( http://niina.amniisia.com/iwrite/index.rdf ) and there appeared the excerpts of my recent entries.
I went through a few sites I regularly visit grabbing the addresses of their RSS feeds and grumbling about the ones who haven’t got them yet.
The one thing I’m wondering is the load that these sorts of programs put on sites. Sure the RSS file may not be big, but if people have their readers set to a very regular update frequency then obviously there’ll be an increased load on the server. So I modified my settings to check for updates every 4 hours but I’m still not certain that’s a nice comfortable frequency. However I won’t have the program running constantly anyways so….
The other option which I’ll probably go to once I’ve got my PC back and done some research is a web based application that I can leave sitting on my server. That way I can just go to the webpage when I’m in need of some reading and it will show me which sites I like have been updated since I last checked.
And once I’ve had a play with this site’s RSS feed I’ll put a link to it over in one of the side columns. But if you add me to a program that’s running all the time, please set it to only check every day or so.. I don’t post that often anyway!