neuralgraffiti

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several people ask me about blogs and RSS and syndication, etc. so I’ve decided to write up a simple primer on how to get started with this stuff. If you’re wondering why John calls me the internet superhero, or how I know the bulk of Stupid Internet Memesâ„¢ going around, or even if you’ve just heard about this “blogging” thing and are curious, then maybe this is for you.

In the end, it’s all about syndication. A growing number of web sites, from blogs to major news organizations are beginning to use a related family of XML-based formats to make their content available in a format that is easier to to distribute than HTML. If you’re not developing software that reads or writes these formats, then you don’t really need to worry about the differences between them, although if you’d like to care, just search around online a bit and you can find all the information (and flamewars) you can possibly read. Just so you recognize them, the two real players are RSS (in various incompatible formats) and Atom. These files are just like the other HTML files that a web server makes available to the world, except that instead of ending in .html, they end in .xml (or in some cases, .rdf).

However, if you open a link to one of these “feeds” in your browser, you’re not going to get anything very useful. In fact, you’re likely to see something like this:

<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<title>neuralgraffiti</title>
		<link>http://neuralgraffiti.com</link>
		<description />
		<pubdate>Tue, 23 Aug 2005 20:49:36+0000</pubdate>
		<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.1.3</generator>
		<language>en</language>
		<item>
			<title />
			<link>http://neuralgraffiti.com/archives/2005/08/23/147/</link>
			<comments>
				http://neuralgraffiti.com/archives/2005/08/23/147/#comments
			</comments>
			<pubdate>Tue, 23 Aug 2005 20:49:36 +0000</pubdate>
			<dc :creator>phil</dc>
			<category>Links</category>
			<dc :subject>funny</dc>
			<dc :subject>reading</dc>
			<dc :subject>lists</dc>
			<guid>http://neuralgraffiti.com/archives/2005/08/23/147/</guid>
			<description>
...
			</description>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

and so on. The above is the first several lines from the feed for this site, and as you can see, it’s not very interesting to a person.

Enter the newsreader:
Here’s where the value of syndication really comes in. I am currently keeping tabs on just under 200 blogs and other feeds. If not for a program to organize all that information, would I be opening 200 websites a day to look at? Hardly. I’d just be getting a lot less information for a lot more time. A newsreading program helps control the firehose of information available. It goes out on your behalf and checks to see if there’s anything you haven’t read yet on a given site, and if there is, it let’s you know somehow — typically by showing a number of unread items.

Plus, it’s great for sites that don’t update very often but that have content you like to read when they do. You get a notification that there’s new material, so you don’t have to remember to keep checking. Or as Alok put it: “Oh, it makes a webpage like a mailing list”.

OK, so where do you get this great software? Well, Wikipedia has a long list of them, but I use Bloglines. It’s a free, online newsreader that also has some neat additional features, like weather and package tracking, thrown in.

MyYahoo! also supports it (click the “Add Content” link and then the “Add RSS by URL” link), as does the beta personalized Google homepage (”Add Content” then “Create a Category”, then enter the feed url).

OK, so I’ve signed up for a Bloglines account, how do I add a feed to my list?

Simple. Click the “Add” link at the top left of your “My Blogs” page on Bloglines. Then find the URL to the feed you want, and paste it into the “Blog or Feed URL” field, like http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Arts.xml. Here’s another cool trick, Bloglines will actually do a little of the legwork for you. Let’s say you wanted to subscribe to the feed for Neuralgraffiti, but couldn’t find a link to the feed. You can just put “http://neuralgraffiti.com/” in that box, and if there’s a feed published on the page, it can find it for you. Nifty, eh? (I assume it uses the “<link> tags in the header, but I’m not sure).

If you don’t want to bother with going back to bloglines all the time, and you use Firefox or Mozilla, I’m a big fan of the Bloglines Mozilla extension. With it, you can right-click on a given page and select the “Subscribe…” link. If you want to add to MyYahoo! or Google, I think you have to use the full URL to the feed.

Now, you’ve got your newsreader and you know how to subscribe to new sites. Now, how do you find all these great sites I’m alleging exist? Well here’s a few starting points:
The New York Times publishes both a front page feed, as well as numerous topic feeds, CNN has feeds as well.

If you’re a Flickr fan, like I am, there’s a ton of feeds available, for any member’s photostream, or group pools, or even all the public photos with a given tag. At the bottom of any of those pages, you’ll find links to RSS and Atom feeds for the page, as well as a simple button to add it to MyYahoo!. I subscribe to feeds of all my friends’ photos as an easy way to keep up with what they’re up to.

If you want to see what I read, I’ve made my bloglines subscriptions public (and there’s a subscribe link in the top right of any of those feed pages). Also, there are a bunch of search engines out there that specialize in blogs, like Technorati, Ice Rocket, or even Bloglines.

Also, the Bloglines list of top blogs probably has something you’re interested in.

This article is a work in progress, so please leave a comment or drop me a line if you want more information, or feel something needs clarifying.