Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Atom

I mentioned recently that there is now a site feed available for this blog. Let me fill in a little more detail if you are unfamiliar with this. If you are in the habit of reading this blog and several others, you can access them from one place using an "aggregator" or "newsreader". Up until recently blogger, which powers this blog, did not provide the site feeds that are necessary to make reading in an aggregator possible. But that has now changed. Now blogger automatically generate a site feed in XML so that you can use the aggregators, newsreaders and so on and pick them up. The name given to this site feed is "Atom". Read more about atom here:

What is Atom?

I've only recently got into this game myself and so far with only mixed results. First, what newsreader or aggregator does one use? Newsmonster comes highly recommended but I can't get past first base on this -- I've downloaded the programme but it will not install. If anyone has any suggestions on that, I'd be grateful. Several of the others require one to part with money; one that doesn't is BottomFeeder. I found this straightforward to download, install and begin to use, but there's a problem with it -- the site feeds from blogger based sites don't represent properly in the content window (mine, Paleojudaica, Hypotyposeis, etc.). It seems especially not to like links. So while one can monitor the appearance of new posts in one's favourite blogs, one still has to open in one's browser. On the other hand, non-blogger based feeds seem to work fine, e.g. AKMA's. So if anyone has any bright ideas on how this could be fixed, I'd be interested to hear them.

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