RSS changes for the blog

If you’re read­ing this entry in an aggre­ga­tor, it means that you’ve already changed your link to TNL.net. Part of the logic for the change (over which I ago­nized for a while as I believe in back­ward com­pat­i­bil­ity) is the fact that until today, the main feed and the sec­tion feeds were gen­er­ated in dif­fer­ent ways, mak­ing it more dif­fi­cult to main­tain and update. I promise that the cur­rent set of changes is the last you will see.

If you’ve sub­scribed to the main feed but want a more detailed approach (ie. you’re only inter­ested in my entries on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject), I’ve got good news for you. Feeds are now avail­able for each inde­pen­dent sec­tion. I’ve cre­ated a new page detail­ing all the syn­di­ca­tion feeds now avail­able on TNL.net. Part of the logic for the new approach is that, if I cre­ate a new cat­e­gory in the blog, you will be able to sub­scribe just that cat­e­gory. This approach allows you to pick and choose which sub­jects you are inter­ested in.

Another new thing is that TNL.net now sup­port CDF, an out­dated Microsoft for­mat that can be used to receive offline infor­ma­tion in Inter­net Explorer. This is only of inter­est to peo­ple using Inter­net explorer to read stuff offline but I fig­ured that it was a good thing to sup­port since I sup­ported pretty much any other syn­di­ca­tion for­mats out there (at least every one that is used by aggregators).

The new approach will allow me to add new feeds based on new for­mats when those appear. It’s a much more flex­i­ble approach and allows me to move for­ward with some other plans for TNL.net.

Last but not least, you will notice that the RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds are now styled. This is largely an attempt to make the infor­ma­tion even eas­ier to read. An inter­est­ing dis­cov­ery dur­ing this exper­i­ment is that the delta between RSS 1.0 and 2.0 is so great that it is impos­si­ble to make the two feeds look exactly alike.