Really Smelly Socks
I've finally implemented an RSS feed for Hamfisted, which is good news for those of you with news readers. For those of you without news readers or even those wondering what RSS stands for, Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary, depending on where you went to school) is a system that allows simple and easy publication of digital content. This is mostly used for frequently updated stuff like news, but it can be used for just about anything, including porn. Users subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds, and their news reader regularly fetches the latest summaries and lists them in a nice, neat format, highlighting older and fresh, unread items. Doing this creates a sort of glittering digital control centre, where you can speedily scan your favourite sources for new content, and efficiently separate the chaff from the wheat.
This efficiency and centralization is great, but does make the RSS experience feel a little bland. My daily news routine used to be a relaxed potter, visited sites at a languid pace and checking, deciding, browsing and reading articles. Now there seems to be an instantaneous (yet bland) flash of light, and I'm at the reading part. Perhaps this is a good thing, as it's surgically removing useless fluffing-about time, but perhaps it's trimming the tomatoes, pickles and onions out of my news burger, leaving only the meat. Meat is undeniably awesome, but a good burger is much, much more. For now I'm using Google's news reader, unsurprisingly called Google Reader. I'll give it a chew for a week or so and see if I like a meat-only diet, or whether what I thought was tasty garnish was actually just a pretty polystyrene wrapper.
If you're thinking of putting an RSS feed together yourself (to be honest, just about every blogging system does it now) you might also want to add RSS Autodiscovery to your web site. This allows browsers and search engines to automatically discover your feed. It's only one line of HTML, and even helps in news readers, as they're pretty much all becoming smart enough to grab the feed address when given the main web address.