I still remember a few years ago, looking at the bookshelf of my computer science geek of a cousin (ok I have many of those, but I'm talking about Adil Bhai) and seeing a book about XML. As if life hadn't become complicated enough with HTML, here was a new and even better programming language for the Internet. Wonderful.
Well I decided to read this book and learn XML so I could do things on the Web. But considering I have few skills when it comes to hard-core computer things (ie programming) I barely made any headway and decided to revisit the book and the subject when it was more relevant.
It's starting to be more relevant.
I'll try again to read the book in the near future, but for now I want to tell you all about my first venture into the world of XML: using the power of syndication.
From Blogger.com:
Syndication means that when you publish your blog, Blogger automatically generates a machine-readable representation of your blog that can be picked up and displayed on other web sites and information aggregation tools. Special pieces of software called Newsreaders (or Aggregators) can scan these feeds, automatically letting you know when the sites have updated.
Some of you have already been reading my blog through the XML protocol, using the Atom format at http://jerseysportsguy.blogspot.com/atom.xml that Blogger automatically provides. If you have, please stop using that one. It looks ugly on IE and I'm sure it doesn't look any better on Aggregators or Mozilla.
In order to cross-promote my blog on Friendster, I have set up a RSS feed (RSS is another format, different from Atom...I think) using the website FeedBurner.com. The link for this feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/jerseysportsguy. Please use this feed from now on if you use an aggregator. I apologize for the huge ad in the middle, but it looks much better.
Because of this, I have also added new buttons on the side of the blog where you can click and go straight to the feed, along with a counter. I hope to see that number go up.
Also, something related: you can now e-mail an individual post of mine to anyone using the little envelope button on the bottom of each post (next to the link for comments). Feel free to use it whenever.
If you have NO idea what I've been talking about here, I apologize. I figure I should try to spruce up my blog (look for pictures soon) and this is one way to do it.
Let me know what you think and I hope to have another post up very soon...
3 comments:
you can do all that stuff in firefox, too.
ps: brown women?
dude youre going all out...youre gonna be THE grenadian blogger...youre gonna be famous son.
Salaam
Yeah - I bought a book on XML: it's not really taken off the way that it was expected to.
It's certainly a useful protocol though, which is good to understand.
I use FireFox's in-built RSS feed reader, and place my live feeds in the bookmarks toolbar folder. That way, the feeds just sit on the toolbar in my browser, and I can just click on them to see what they contain - instantly and in one place, maa shaa-a Allah.
Salaam.
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