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Aug 18, 2006
Welcome, folks from the Atomic Thinktank!
This is my little playground where, I admit, I haven't done
much playing of late. I believe the technical term for that
is "on hiatus".
I haven't been completely quiet, I'm still doing the odd bit
for Lame Mage. Make
sure you purchase the latest,
The Death of Dr Null.
In the meantime, please check out the back catalog and enjoy the show.
-Jem
Feed me, baby
Dec 10, 2005
My irregular update schedule has got me thinking about RSS, especially
about clients. Since an RSS subscription is the most reliable way to
keep up with updates, it behooves me to make sure my RSS is in good
shape. As part of that effort, I have about four different methods of
checking the Stickopolis feed. There are dedicated RSS clients that
will subscribe to a feed, but they don't interest me. I want my RSS
newsfeed packaged with a program I use regularly. So for your
benefit, here's the rundown on the various RSS subscription methods
I've tried.
The first thing I have to do is make sure the RSS feed is correct.
There's a website that validates my RSS code.
This was especially helpful when I was first creating the RSS file,
usually by hand. Now that the feed is part of my regular automation I
don't check this anymore. I ran my feed through the validator, and I
aced it. Booyah!
Speaking of RSS generation, does anyone know of a good simple, free
Win32 RSS creation program? I've tried nearly a dozen from Tucows and other sites, but they've
either been too painful to use or they didn't generate human-readable
xml. Putting everything on one line is a definite deal-breaker.
The best reader I've found has actually been the Firefox browser. Firefox lets you
subscribe to an RSS feed as a dynamic bookmark, which is pretty nice.
The only downside is that the bookmark dosn't give any indication that
the feed has been updated, you have to check it manually. It
also takes a few hours for any changes to register.
Firefox also has several extensions that allow you to subscribe to an
RSS feed. I use SAGE as my test platform. It's nice in that it
catches the updates very quickly. It's not as transparent as I would
like, but it has worked very well for me.
Next, My Yahoo! lets you subscribe
to RSS feeds now. It's pretty handy and integrates cleanly into the
My Yahoo! page. The downside is that it takes at least a day before
it registers that a feed has updated. I don't know what controls
that, but it's fairly aggravating.
Then there's Mozilla Thunderbird,
which will subscribe to RSS feeds as well. However, as of Thunderbird
1.02, there's something amiss. Thunderbird will pick up a feed very
quickly, but it has problems with the specific feed that Stickopolis
uses.
I try to have the latest item always point to my main page. Every
item below points directly to the archived comic file. So when I
enter a new item, the previous item is updated to point to the comic
archive while the new one points to my homepage. Thunderbird doesn't
handle this well, and it could be that I'm using poor RSS form.
Currently it seems to be one comic behind, but I've had it pull down
multiple instances of the same update and mark them as new. So for my
purposes, Thunderbird is not an adequate RSS reader.
The win32 instant messaging client Trillian has an RSS plugin,
but you have to be using the pay version to use it. Since I have
only the free version, I can't tell you if or how well it works, but
the screen shots looks slick.
Finally, I'm told by my Mac friends that Safari does RSS, and it even
pops a notice when the feed has been updated. I don't know how often
it checks, but it seems to take a few hours to register the update.
So you Mac folks seem to get the best deal. Figures.
-Jem
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