If you have a MovableType blog, then you might have wondered what the 'Syndicate this site' link at the bottom of the sidebar is. It's a link to a short document that summarizes the content on your site, usually the last 15 items/entries. It's a fast, compact way of delivering the content of your website without people actually having to visit. You can submit your 'feed' to site which collects and publishes feeds (aggregators) and in the end bring traffic to your site. (Technorati for example) It's also handy for keeping up with changes to sites, as you can just grab the feeds from all the sites you follow with your own aggregator, instead of having to visit each site and try to remember the last thing you saw.
So there's a whole history to RSS/RDF. It was started, dropped, and then picked up by two independent groups, which didn't work together. So what we have now is an old but simple RSS 0.91, an independent, unrelated RSS 1.0, and finally RSS 2.0, which is an update of 0.91. If you are curious about all the versions and more description of RSS/RDF, there's a good page with lots of info.
My original MT installation come with RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0, but I just upgraded the RSS 0.9 to 2.0 according to the instructions here.
The main reason I delved further into the topic is that I wanted to use an aggregator to keep track of the blogs of my friends. For all those who are on moorehill.net/keyurp.com I already get notices of new posts, but for my friends who aren't (Sunny, Jackson) I don't remember to check very often. There are hundreds of RSS aggregator/reader packages out there, and a quick Google search will take you to bunch options. If you use Mozilla, there's a handy little extension called Sage which builds this function right into a sidebar in the browser. All you have to do is bookmark all your feeds into a single folder, and Sage takes care of the rest. Now I can check everyone's blog by opening the sidebar, and hitting one button.
By the way (see I typed it out), two of the expansions I found for RSS were Real Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary. RDF stands for Resource Document Framework.
My disclaimer: You may not find syndication useful, but if you follow lots of entry based websites (not just blogs), they are very useful.
Posted by ramk at June 30, 2004 09:54 PM