RSS · Grey Nicholson

Apostrophes

2004-03-15T16:10:00+00:00

I'm now using the aforementioned RSS Reader to read this weblog. So it has to be valid Atom, the content must validate when RSSified, and still validate when XHTMLified. Thus, to save hassle relating to escape characters and other such technicalities, I'm now using straight apostrophes as “quotes”. It's ugly, but it works.

Update: with the advent of the Mooquackwhatnotbot I'm now using proper HTML quotes - <q> and </q>. The usual disclaimer about Internet Explorer's crapness applies, as does one about Atom feed readers - they probably won't show any quotes.

Bye Bye, Sharpreader

2004-03-14T20:30:00+00:00

Since the demise of the free FeedDemon betas, I'd been using Sharpreader or Wildgrape NewsDesk (depending on what mood I was in) to read RSS feeds. Neither was perfect, but I'd settled on Sharpreader, despite the oh-so-slow notification pop-ups (this on a 2.5GHz machine...). But today I thought I'd give the RSS Reader Panel for Firefox (http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#rssreaderpanel) another try. Guess what? It's pretty good. The Open In Contents Area option now produces a spiffy-looking display, with the option of customising the CSS used (so you can't complain even if you don't like it).

The addition of new feeds isn't as slick as it might be, but it's just as easy as creating a new bookmark ...because you just have to create a new bookmark. There doesn't seem to be an option for intermingling all of the items into a single date-sorted list, but that's not too much of a worry.

RSSification

2004-02-24T19:20:00+00:00

2RSS (http://www.2rss.com/) has a nice converteriser which outputs any Atom feed (such as this one - wink, wink) as RSS, available at http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss So now even if your newsreader isn't Atom-enabled you can still read this weblog; now you've got no excuse.

Klipfolio + Atom = 0

2004-02-19T15:25:00+00:00

Well! It seems that one can't (easily) use an atom feed as klipfood :/ By “easily” I mean I can't just point it towards the URL and have it automagically work, like it does for RSS. Eh, well... I'm gonna hold the klip back until I can get it assimilating this feed; at the moment it's just a rehash of the RSS feed, intermingled with The Twaddle's RSS feed.