Xpression.v2

I’m not sure how many people actually pay attention to the RSS/Atom feeds on the site (see them at the top right corner?), but I decided that it’s a possible area of growth for me. Let’s face it, I make no money from this site since I refuse to inconvenience you with advertisements, so the monthly hit count is the only real payment I get out of this (other than the venting aspect, of course).

So, let me get to the point. I have added the feeds to Feed Burner in a hopes of getting an understanding of who uses these feeds and how they use them. For the sake of the ease of transition, I have made it so the old addresses, /wordpress/feed/ and /wordpress/comments/feed/, point to the new addresses, so this possibly large change will be completely transparent.

At this point, I’m sure some people are asking themselves just what the hell am I talking about. Well, RSS feeds allow you to “subscribe” to any site and get information about new updates without having to visit the site directly. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox (also, Opera, but few of you use it) support these feeds and there are many other programs that do too. In Firefox, the feed becomes a bookmark that acts as a folder. When you hover over the bookmark, it opens up showing you all the latest posts on the site in question. For instance, here’s a shot of my bookmark for the RSS feed from Yankees.com:

In Internet Explorer, you can open up the “Feeds” panel and view the feed in a prettier, more informative way as such:

I’m not sure if I explained it well enough or just ended up confusing some people more than they were, so here’s a link to a Wikipedia article about the RSS format:
RSS (file format)

Try the feeds out and see what you think. I’ll make sure to post more often so you can really get use out of them

Filed under: General