Despite my claims

[larryhammer]

A couple months ago, in a discussion in someone else's LJ, I explained how much work it would take to create by hand an RSS feed of my web log, eventually concluding that it wasn't worth the effort.

Some of you are already snickering. Stop that.

Larry's Pretty Good Web Log is now syndicated for news aggregators. We'll see how long till LJ notices it.

I said stop snickering.

---L.

Comments

[randimason.livejournal.com]

If I had a paid account, they'd notice it right now because it could be set up here; since I do not, it might take longer.

And I would probably do a lot less snickering if you explained how you set up the RSS to begin with.

[larryhammer]

I will once I get it validating again. Dang—it was working.

<tinker tinker ... >

---L.

[kathlaw.livejournal.com]

Interesting list, but what's an RSS?

[larryhammer]

Let's take those in reverse order. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or possibly other things—there's contraversy over that as every other aspect of the format). It's an alternate format to HTML for publishing content that changes relatively frequently, such as news stories or blog entries. Instead of a web browser, you read it in a news aggregator like Amphetadesk or Radio Userland (which latter is a blog reader as well as publisher). Blogspace has more info about RSS in general.

All LiveJournals are also automatically published as RSS, and you can read many non-LJ RSS feeds by adding them to your Friends—by some mechanism that LucyAnne understands but I don't. Which nicely segues to

I followed these instructions, supplimented by this. I'm using v0.91 because all aggregators "know" it and is the simplest to write. Because my log entries don't have titles, I use the date as the title; the link is the permalink to the archived entry and the description is the text of the entry without any a-links. The latter because I'd have to escape it, and that's too much work when editing in Notepad; if someone wants to learn what links I'm posting, they can follow to the entry and then click through.

So schema of directory structure: main directory is all the main pages; subdirectory Log has log.html, a series of log archive files going back four years, and lpgwl.xml. The last is my RSS feed.

Make sense?

---L.

[larryhammer]

Okay, it's validating again. Stupid DOCTYPE declaration.

---L.

Thanks

[kathlaw.livejournal.com]

Okay, I think it all makes sense. (Me, not you, being the dense one.) Thanks!

Re: Thanks

[larryhammer]

Being gaseous, I compress to very high densities. Often.

---L.