...in with the new

This shall be my final post on xenotrope.diaryland.com.

Why would I ever desert Diaryland? Syndication. Syndication and the fact that the Diaryland servers have an unfortunate tendency to rate-limit the number of people who can add new posts at certain times. And by "certain times", I mean "noon to 6 PM daily".

Diaryland is a fine and functional service, and it more than adequately serves my needs. No question, it's top-notch for the purposes of posting UNIX howtos and belittling anonymous people I've found on the Internet who have a different opinion of certain software titles than I do.

But let's talk for a moment about syndication. Syndication is just a fancy word for "has an RSS feed", and RSS is the thing that's currently making my life easier....

[Cue wavy lines, flashback]

When I was in college, I loved having broadband in my dorm room because it meant I could check a bunch of websites quickly. I loved using the Opera web browser because I could index my bookmarks into folders sort of like regular files, and Opera would let me open each bookmark in a given folder simultaneously. This neat little feature would open something like a dozen small windows for all my favorite bookmarks that changed content on a regular basis. I called it "The Daily" because it contained a variety of news, webcomics, and opinion sites that I would insist on seeing daily.

Back to the present.

Sometime in the last few years, somebody got so sick of doing that himself that he put together a nifty XML format for giving everyone the opportunity to keep abreast of stuff like webcomics and news sites and, before they were cool, blogs. It was called RSS and it exists in several different versions, many of which consider "RSS" to mean something entirely different than the others.

I got with the times, picked a couple of choice RSS aggregator programs, and started rebuilding the Daily. I don't call it the Daily anymore, of course. Craig Kilborn of The Daily Show sort of ruined that for me. Now, I just call them "my feeds", and they include blogs of friends, Penny Arcade and other comics, OpenBSD Journal, Peter David, the infamous exploits of UK's own Belle de Jour, Amorous Propensities, Robert X. Cringely, Dare Obasanjo, Russell Beattie, and Time Magazine's top stories, just to name a few. I don't spend half an hour clicking on bookmarks anymore trying to get updates from all of these places. I get new updates listed, and if there's no new content, I don't have to spend the time looking at the old content and confirming that I've seen it before. Syndication is a big time-saver.

Diaryland, however, has not gotten with the times, though several competing online blogging resources have deployed RSS feeds for their users. Blogger.com uses Atom, which is based on RSS, and I am not willing to discuss the controversial background story for why anyone saw a need to offshoot RSS and make a new format. I'm using Atom and you're just going to have to deal with that.

So I've changed my needs: I still need to post boring minutiae about getting Postfix to speak pig latin, I still need to call down the righteous wrath of Holy God in Heaven upon anyone who dares to slander the perfection that is Mozilla Firefox. And I need to syndicate now.

Why? Why syndicate? It's the golden rule. I like it when I go to somebody's website, personal or professional, and I see a link to an RSS feed or an Atom feed. If I like what I see, I'll put that little link into my aggregator and I'll follow along with whatever they post there. It's so much more convenient to manually add a feed to RSS Bandit and have it checked automatically than it is to quickly bookmark the site with a keystroke and then check it manually day after day after day. It has gotten to the point where if I like a website, and I don't find a feed for it, that's points off. Free-money-and-all-the-cheddar-you-can-eat.com might be the site of my dreams, but if they don't have a feed, I'm not going to stay up-to-date with them, simply because doing so must be done by hand.

Having a feed is thus little more than common courtesy. It's not exactly a huge deal if you read my page once every week or so, but for the three people who hit it daily wanting new content are wasting a portion of their limited lifetime checking for it. With a feed, you can check for updates with a mouse click. Without a feed, you are required to load the page in a browser and confirm that it's still yesterday's edition for yourself. Yawn.

My new diary, heretofore called a blog, can be found at http://xenotrope.blogspot.com/. Hope to see you there.