In summary, the weblog now has one feed and there’s a new combined feed containing weblog, linklog, mp3 blog and my BugPowder posts.
Spent a bit of time today sorting out my RSS feeds. One of the downsides of figuring stuff out for yourself and learning from your mistakes is that sometimes your mistakes are hard to erase. Case in point was the wide variety of feeds I’d set up on this blog. Y’see, I’d assumed that I needed to have a feed for all the major forms of RSS (0.9, 1.0, 2.0, atom) so I set them all up, and then, in a stroke of genius, I made them all do exactly the same thing. Which is, of course, not the point. In theory, and I’ll admit to being a bit vague on this, the different flavours of RSS have different uses (Atom, for example, is good for international characters) but when you’re just bashing out a title-post-link weblog they all pretty much work the same, so I only need the one. This one, in fact, which is RSS 1.0, chosen because it seems to be the most widely used from this site and not because I think it’s a better standard. I have no idea if it’s better, truth be told, and I suspect it doesn’t really matter in my circumstances.
Of course, there are people who are subscribed to my other feeds, which is why I put off doing this until now, but using the magic .htaccess file (see previous post) they’re all redirected to the one feed. This might work, it might not, so let me know if you’re having problems. (Or just re-subscribe. But let me know anyway.)
The other, slightly more interesting, thing I’ve done is set up a feed that combines all my weblog activity into one place, rather like the main peteashton.com web page. Subscribe to this and you’ll get the weblog, linklog, mp3 blog and my BugPowder posts all together. Which is pretty damn cool when you think about it.
The three blogs from this site (web, link, mp3) were combined using the OtherBlog plugin, while my BugPowder posts were brought over using the MTRSSFeed plugin, currently used to do the same thing on the website. The latter was a bit of a bodge as MTRSSFeed doesn’t appear to bring over date information for individual posts, so when you sort the feed by date in something like NetNewsWire all the BugPowder posts appear at the top, at least to begin with. There might be a workaround if I can figure it out, but for now, my apologies. If you’re using something like BlogLines, which only displays unread posts, this shouldn’t be a problem.
While I was at it I did the same for the Stator blogs – use this feed to read them all at once.