Saturday, April 02, 2005

RSS feeds for Blogger blogs, or Atom vs. RSS

Everybody's talking about RSS feeds, syndication, aggregation, XML, etc. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't offer direct support for RSS feeds. It does offer Atom feeds, and it happens that most software than can handle RSS also can handle Atom. More specifically, due to the extreme popularity of Blogger as a blog hosting service, everybody really wants to support what feed file format Blogger supports, which happens to be Atom. I have no idea what the relative merits of RSS and Atom are, but as long as everybody supports Blogger feed files, I'm happy.

To find your Blogger blog's feed file, take the URL for your blog (e.g., http://jackkonblog.blogspot.com) and tack on "/atom.xml" (e.g., http://jackkonblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml). Note that some software, such as Bloglines, is smart enough to take just the blog URL and then actually figure out what feeds are supported by your blog hosting service.

-- Jack Krupansky

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home