RSS Feed Online

After a bit of tinkering I have a FeedBurner (RSS & Atom) feed for this subject online. It can be subscribed to here. The issue was my content management system (Mambo 4.5.1) only natively supporting feeds of the site frontpage. Fortunately there is an add-on that supports multiple site feeds but setting this up is far from intuitive. Oh well, its up now I guess.

It's actually interesting to see the development of the different RSS/Atom standards. RSS begun development as a group project but then a difference of opinion between Dave Winer and a number of other members split the project in two. Dave Winer produced RSS 0.91 whilst a little while later the working group came out with RSS 1.0.

I've listened to a few podcasts with Dave Winer and I definitely would not want to get on his wrong side. What he does firmly believe in is that things should be simple, not complex and that is just what his subsequent RSS 2.0 set out to achieve. Whilst RSS 1.0 was based on RDF tag syntax RSS 2.0 dropped that in favour of very simple, comprehensible syntax. Consequently RSS 2.0 wiped the floor with RSS 1.0.

Atom is a later development that has begun to tackle the difficult problems of transactions and different payloads, especially as RSS has begun to be acknowledged as a very good way of communicating (syndicating) information across a wide audience. Like RSS 2.0, Atom has left RDF syntax behind and is focusing on practical needs rather than academic principles. Unlike RSS, Atom uses a far stricter XML syntax that has led it to be incompatible with the RSS 1.0/2.0 standards...