Matthew Ernest: Fifteen

Now you know

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 22:00:55 GMT

Be happy!.
Matthew Ernst: content:encoded makes me sad:

People that include the full text in their RSS 2.0 feed instead of just an automatically truncated "excerptoid" make me happy. However, including the full text in a while still keeping the exceptoid in the makes me sad. I'm not even sure what the motivation is to having , since as far as I know you can put that sort of thing in an RSS 2.0 just fine.

You certainly can put anything you want in an RSS 2.0 . That doesn't mean you should. I think it's a great thing that so many people are reading blogs in RSS aggregators these days, and as a result agitating to have more people do full-content feeds.

However, we need to not lose sight of the fact that reading in an aggregator isn't the only use for RSS. My blog is syndicated (in the original sense of Really Simple Syndication, publishing on another website) in a couple of places that don't really make use of a hand-crafted excerpt, but if you look at Henrik Gemal's Mozilla-related blogs page, and hover over the links, you'll see that some people have short ugly chopped off posts from Movable Type's auto-excerpts, and some people have slightly longer ugly chopped off posts from Gemal's own auto-excerpting, but a few people have a perfectly sensible, readable and understandable excerpt, because they put one in for things that syndicate, along with for people who are using RSS for reading.

It's a marvelous combination, having two elements for each of two different uses (three, if you count people who have intentionally built their aggregator to only show them a short description because they would rather read posts in the original web page), and I only hope that Radio includes Matthew's code or something like it (just like it did with his code that now allows him to talk about those tags with HTML entities without double-decoding them and interpreting them) so that Radio users can enjoy full content in their aggregator without forcing people who are also providing their feed to syndicators to not provide them what they want.
[phil ringnalda dot com]

Tell me, who are you?

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 22:00:15 GMT

You're a handsome blog, what's your owner's name?.
Sam Ruby reports being confused by meeting Dave Shea and Matt Mullenweg, when he wouldn't have had a problem with meeting The CSS Zen Garden guy and photomatt. I actually wouldn't have had any problem with either of those names, but although I know I'm subscribed to Dave's weblog, I wouldn't have been able to easily find it in my subscriptions until just a few minutes ago, when I changed the name in Bloglines from mezzoblue to Dave Shea.

It's a drastic step, throwing away the name of someone's blog that way, but it's the only thing I get to change in Bloglines. What works best for me are feeds done like Joshua Kaufman's unraveled, where the feed has the title "unraveled" and the description "Joshua Kaufman's Personal Website", so that every time I glance at the header above a post I get reminded whose feed it is.

On the other hand, despite having read and enjoyed Pushing Rectangles ("Speed has always been important otherwise one would not need a computer.") for going on two years now, it wasn't until I left my aggregator and went to the webpage the other day while bookmark blogging that I realized/remembered that it was Matthew Ernest's blog, and thus remembered the whole who/when/why behind my having read him all this time.

Even though I know I'm not getting to know a whole person, just the parts that you choose to publish about you, I still think of you as people, not as publications, and it's your personal voice that attracts me to your blog. And the way I know people is by their names (even if their name is StavrosTheWonderChicken - I don't care what's on your birth certificate, just that it be a name-for-you, not a name-for-a-thing-of-yours). So, would you mind reminding me of your name in your feed?
[phil ringnalda dot com]

Feed me, Seymour

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 05:32:32 GMT

I'm suscribed to Mark's feed in my aggregator, where I read that he has picked up a new feed in his aggregator from the list the feeds that I'm subscribed to in my aggregator.

feeds.scripting.com. A new discovery tool as addictive as the others. (100 words, 7 links) [markpasc.org]