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Now With RSS!

Posted on: 2006-04-25

The Silicon Valley Ruby Conference was a lot of fun and really informative. A funny side effect is that my notes were linked in Accordian Guy's tucows blog, which put me at the top of the Technorati page for the conference for a day or so. I've moved back down now, but it's been a bit of a shock for me to have people actually reading this blog, which has had 15 posts in the eight months or so that it's been up, and which was cobbled together in about two hours in PHP4 as an experiment while building some client relationship and work tracking tools.

With the prospect of this becoming more of a real Blog with, like, readers, I've decided to get with at least Web 1.5 and finally set up an RSS feed. It's amazing how something that seems so simple in concept can turn out to be so picky and complex. Getting the data to show up in an XML file is easy - the tricky stuff is figuring out whether to use 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, 2.0, Atom or RDF, wrestling with awkward date formats, and discovering the hard way that a lot of HTML doesn't pass through correctly, especially </UL> tags - you know, to close bullet lists, like the ones I just used in my last two blog posts about the conference.

So, for now at least, the feed just shows the titles of the entries without any content - something I've always been annoyed at other sites for doing. Now I understand that it's not just for getting people to see your banner ads. Click on the orange logo at the bottom of the screen to get the feed. You'll be instantly notified about new wise-cracks from technology conferences, as well as any new musical obsessions.

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