Hg's Amazing Syndicolour Blogpost

A few administrative notes for the curious. Earlier this week I realised I was a bit fed up with how dreary the hydragenic.com colour scheme was looking in the new-found sunshine (didn't last long, UK readers, did it?), so I changed the burgundy to a brighter red. On Friday morning, I realised that by changing the background grey colour to white I could create a partly ironic but mostly affectionate Saint George's flag colour scheme as a token of support for the English football team. (Finally, I'm reaping the rewards of the painful conversion to CSS earlier this year - the whole site was changed within about thirty seconds.) Having done this, two unexpected things happened: firstly, they won and secondly, I decided I liked it better without the grey.

Next, I started to get interested in RSS, which is an XML-based content summary and syndication protocol. In order to present an RSS version of hydragenic.com, I had to turn on titles for each individual post within Blogger Pro. Although I've previously ignored this feature because I simply didn't want it, I decided that if I was going to create titles I may as well use them on the page, so here they are (for the uninitiated, we're talking about the words 'Hg's Amazing Syndicolour Blogpost' above). Also, I've implemented an RSS 0.91 feed at http://hydragenic.com/hg_rss.xml. I've put a permanent link to this at the bottom of the left-hand menu, in case you have no idea what this means now but want to come back to it in a few weeks or months.

So, what's RSS all about? Frankly, I'm only beginning to figure it out myself. It allows other parties to take what I'm writing here on hydragenic.com and include it in their own sites, if they so wish. This aspect of RSS isn't that interesting to me at the moment, though as ever I reserve the right to execute a complete volte face at a moment's notice.

It also allows people to use a newsfeed application to aggregate content from multiple sites and to get notifications when new content is posted. This is the side of RSS that I can see being most useful to me personally, because trying to keep up with the ever-increasing number of interesting blogs out there is becoming something of a hassle, to be honest. Also, YACCS users will find that they can use an RSS feed to get notifications when someone posts a comment to their blog (see the related question 14 in the YACCS FAQ).

If you want to experiment with RSS, my advice is to download a free reader (I'm currently using FeedReader for Windows, but plenty of other readers are available for various platforms); you can progress to something a little more advanced if you think it's going to be useful.

Now I have to trawl all of my favourite sites over the next few days to see how many offer RSS. Maybe you can do me a favour - if you have a site with an RSS feed, leave me a comment so I can add it to my reader? Thanks in advance.

Posted by Hg on Saturday 08 June 2002 at 19:56.
Received 1 comments so far.

I just added a RSS feed to my english blog too. The feedreader program is actually smart, especially when more and more blogs are delivering rss feeds. I am going toadd yours to my feedreader right away.

Comment by Ingrid on Saturday 08 June 2002 at 18:34.

http://www.hydragenic.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hydragen/mt/mt-tb.cgi/151

The previous post was Life And Death.

The next post is Back To The Vaults.

All original material on this site is © Hydragenic, 2002-2008. Extracts of other people's work are used for the purpose of criticism, review or news reporting, in line with the "fair dealing" (or "fair use") principle.