The Official Commonwealth of Virginia Home Page took me by surprise when I was looking for RSS feeds. Maybe there's a secret plan to change the state license plate slogan to "Virginia is for LoveRSS?"

Feeding Frenzy? I just discovered that this neglected Blogger site of mine generates both RSS and Atom feeds, but for some reason the last couple of posts didn't show up in the Atom version. This is a test (obviously).

http://boblog.blogspot.com/rss/boblog.xml

http://boblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml


It could be that publishing the previous update with NewsMonster generated the XML feed, while making this one directly in Blogger revived the Atom feed.

NewsMonster is mentioned below without a link, so adding one seems like the right thing to do. NewsMonster turns Mozilla into a three-panel RSS aggregator. Alas, the wizards at Blogger-Google don't include an RSS feed in these free Blogspot accounts, and Newsmonster doesn't yet support the new Atom format that B/G is promoting.

The Occupational Adventure (sm) Blog: Getting unstuck OK, nothing is quite as "sticky" as trying to write about a dozen aggregators at once, with a deadline that coincides with a certain IRS one... so I'm quite happy to have stumbled on Curt Rosengren's blog. I followed a link to it from Steven Cohen's Library Stuff. Actually, having two real deadlines actually helps with the unsticking, providing the "Future focus" he mentions.

300 Years of News Aggregation?
As part of my research on XML feed aggregators, I'm trying the NewsMonster aggregator, which installs into Mozilla and lets me subscribe to an RSS feed with a right mouse-click.
While doing that, I noticed that the right mouse button menu also has a "blog this with Blogger" item on the menu, so I'm giving it a try. I knew I was keeping this old blog around for something!

Blogger is now offering "Atom" syndication feeds, a standard different from the RSS syndication feeds used by my other blogs. Although I don't blog regularly here these days, I've activated the feed and added this item to see what it looks like.

The Atom file is called "atom.xml" and is located at this blog's main folder:
http://boblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I knew it wouldn't work, but attempted to subscribe to it with my usual aggregators (Radio and NetNewswire) to see what would happen. Both are designed for RSS XML feeds, and both failed. Radio's message says, "[Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "channeltitle" hasn't been defined.]"

One interesting feature of the Atom feed is that its XML file includes a link to a stylesheet, which tells browsers how to display the file in human-readable format, although the feed is really meant to be read by an aggregator. Radio's RSS files are also XML, but with no stylesheet.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327/rss.xml

The human-readable version is the weblog itself, at http://radio.weblogs.com/0106327/, which you can also get to from my homepage or through my shortcut at stepno.com/weblog

I don't have time to read all the debate about the RSS syndication format or the reasons Blogger (owned by Google) decided to use Atom instead. RSS works for me and for places I read -- including The New York Times, the BBC, and my weblogging friends at Harvard and MIT. From my point of view as a user, RSS lives up to its name as "Really Simple Syndication," in addition to being my Dad's initials.

Happy New Year, New Blogs & Blog News

My homepage has officially moved to stepno.com.
My two most current weblogs are my Other Journalism Weblog and the Red Liner. I'll be making changes to the way I use both of them (and this long-neglected one) in January.