Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
Readers occasionally ask for notification that this website has new content, in contrast to having to look from time to time for whether I have posted a new What’s New page and then to remember whether the latest that’s there is new to them. It’s a good suggestion, of course.
Of the various technologies for this, the RSS feed is easily what’s suggested most. No doubt RSS devotees expect that authors of websites will adapt the content for presentation as an RSS feed. They likely also expect to read the new pages without leaving their feed viewer. I’m sorry, but there’s only so much I can do. I might do more if those who want my website as an RSS feed will tell me how to set up what they want.
What I will do is maintain an RSS feed’s XML database so that it lists each new What’s New page and perhaps some others if they seem sufficiently self-contained. This looks to me like the best balance. What I write here is not a sequence of self-contained news items that’s naturally adapted to a feed. Neither is it a blog of pages that are written once and then left alone. It is instead a large collection of occasionally updated or reworked reference material that is organised hierarchically with a Table Of Contents (TOC). The succession of What’s New pages is the closest the site comes to being a blog. It’s all that I see is suitable for presentation as a feed.
As for presentation within a feed viewer, I’m sorry, but for better or worse, I long ago decided that I do not want my content re-presented within other websites. My scripts assume that my pages as I prepare them are loaded into a browser’s top window. If instead they are already in a frame, then they try to get reloaded into a new window. I don’t see why any feed viewer should have trouble with this. Of course, I might think differently if I myself liked to see the Internet through a feed viewer.
Anyway, that’s how things are, and why, if only for now. Meanwhile, if you want that your feed viewer subscribes to this site, then here’s the RSS Feed XML (which is anyway where some feed viewers look for it automatically).