RSS Feeds

Anyone who was subscribed to the full.rdf or full.xml feeds from this site would have stopped getting updates for a couple of weeks. Sorry about that – I’ve fixed it all now and you should have just recieved many days worth of bloggy goodness.

It’s worth pointing out that full.rdf and full.xml are both deprecated and I’ll probably be killing them off in the next few weeks. Don’t worry tho’ I’ll be doing some sort of HTTP magic to ensure that your RSS reader gets redirected to the appropriate place.

And while we’re talking about deprecating feeds, I see that Atom 1.0 is about ready to go, which means that I can’t for the life of me the point in RSS 2.0 any more. If you want a simple syndication format then use Atom 1.0 and if you want the full power of RDF go with RSS 1.0.

With that in mind, I’m also considering removingf the RSS 2.0 feeds from this site. Again, I’ll redirect anyone trying to access it to the Atom feed instead.

So, to summarise, I’ll be providing a few less feeds of this site over the next few weeks. There will be an RSS 1.0 feed and an Atom 1.0 feed. In addition, there will also be the Feedburner version which combines my blog feed, my del.icio.us feed and my Flickr feed in one (RSS 1.0) feed.

Does that all make sense?

4 comments

  1. I presume this means that the LiveJournal syndicated account ‘davorg_full’ should be changed to feed not from http://dave.org.uk/blog/full.rdf but from http://blog.dave.org.uk/index.rdf or http://blog.dave.org.uk/atom.xml.

    I’d prefer not to trust LiveJournal to do the right thing and follow HTTP redirects, or whatever it is you’re going to put in place for people going to the old URL, and instead have LiveJournal explicitly update the URL to point to either the new RSS feed or the new Atom feed. (Either should be fine, I think, so presumably Atom if you think that’s better.)

    If you agree with this suggestion, I suggest you do arrange for the change by contacting support@livejournal.com and asking for the syndicated account’s URL to be changed; if you like, though, I can do it.

  2. Yes, I agreed that this is a good idea and I’ll do it this evening.And incidently, I don’t think that Atom is better than RSS 1.0. I think that Atom makes RSS 2.0 obsolete, but that RSS 1.0 is still far superior to either of them.

  3. You probably want RSS 1.1 these days, not 1.0. :-)

    And well, RSS 1.x might be better for cases where you need/want RDF, and if you are actually reading it using an RDF parser. But only the tiniest minority of aggregators actually do that; most of them treat RSS 1.x as any old XML document.

    Even so, Atom has a specified, if informal translation to RDF, and a well-specified extension model. So you need RSS 1.x only if you want to do really far out triplet stuff.

    But anyway, yeah. We can finally get rid of that abortion of a format called RSS 2.0. *clap* *clap* for removing those feeds.

    I’ll be updating to Atom 1.0 (from 0.3) very soon, as well.

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