I almost filed this under General Stupidity, because I am so damned stupid about this stuff, but I figured Site Maintenance was more appropriate.
At any rate, I have identified and RSS feed, and it is:
https://balloon-juice.com/index.rdf
Is that the only one? Some have .xml extensions. Do I have or need others?
Also, how do I get the nifty little icon “My Yahoo” code so people can click it and add this site with ease.
Are there any other things like that I need to be aware of? What else do I need to do that I can help make it easier for the readers (other than coherent posts with decent grammar and spell-check- you are SOL on that one)?
Thx in advance.
Oh, and the first three people to buy blogads at normal price will get the same time period for free.
Ben Regenspan
The feed at https://balloon-juice.com/index.xml is your RSS 0.91 feed. I’m pretty sure that the .rdf one is an entirely different type of syndication feed – its advantage is that it includes date information for each post, as well as the category you filed it under, but it’s probably supported by fewer feed reading programs.
Even though RSS .91 is an old version (there’s now 2.0), and doesn’t include date fields for each entry, it remains the most widely-supported– personally, I’d stick with it. Yahoo! has a page at http://my.yahoo.com/s/button.html that helps you generate the code to add one of the “Add to My Yahoo” buttons, just plug in the https://balloon-juice.com/index.xml URL and you’re set.
Nash
Many thanks for the feed. Now that’s what I call instant gratification in the blog world.
Bob Munck
The Firefox browser has a plugin for spelling checking on the contents of a text box. While I’m typing this, I can just right-click and select menu item “check spelling.”
I’ve never seen a grammar checker that I thought was worth the effort, at least not for a natural language. If you don’t know English grammar, you probably shouldn’t be writing English.
Ron Beasley
John
head over to Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com/) and the can fix you up with the yahoo thing and other RSS stuff.
John Cole
Ron- I have no idea which ones of those I should use. It gives 9 bazillion options.
Evan
John,
The “index.rdf” feed is RSS 1.0. RSS 1.0 has been out for a long time and its basic functionality is pretty well-supported at this point. It also has the advantage of including the date, which other posters have pointed out.
What else should you be aware of, you ask? Here are a couple of things to think about.
1. When you make a post in Moveable Type, you might have noticed that there is an “Excerpt” box. If you put something in this box, the RSS feed will display that text. If you leave the box blank, Moveable Type displays the first N characters of the post with a trailing elipsis. For example, this post appears in my news aggregator as, “I almost filed this under General Stupidity, because I am so damned stupid about this stuff, but I figured Site …”
The above auto-generated excerpt is okay, but it doesn’t do the best job of telling the reader what this post is about. If you wanted to, you could create hand-crafted excerpts by cutting-and-pasting the most “punchy” sentence or paragraph into the Excerpt box. It only takes a few more seconds, and it can make the feed a lot more interesting.
2. Another option is, if you are comfortable altering your Moveable Type templates, you can alter your feed to automatically include the full content of the post, rather than just the excerpt.
3. Another thing you could do is alter your templates so that you are generating *multiple* feeds, segregated by category. Just think, you could have one feed for the wingnuts AND one feed for the bleeding heart liberals! Errr, well, maybe that’s not the *greatest* idea, but anyway.
4. Above all, make sure you use an aggregator and subscribe to your own feed(s). That way you can see what the feeds look like to other people, and detect fatal parsing errors if and when they occur.
That’s about all I can think of off the top of my head. Have fun!
Evan
Whoops, that should be “first N words”, not “first N characters”, where N is configurable in Moveable type.
Also, there is a feature called “feed autodiscovery”, where certain aggregators can automatically detect your primary feed. Currently, your RSS 1.0 feed is set as the auto-discover feed, so in a sense, it is your “default” feed.
Also also, there are in fact *nine* versions of RSS, all of which are incompatible with each other (see http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss for the gory details.) But for your own sanity, you don’t want to follow that rabbit hole to see how far it goes.