While I’d been considering this for a little while, Dave’s ‘Information Aversion’ post prompted me to un-splice my Flickr photos from my RSS feeds. Having done that, I’ve updated my feeds page to list my current available syndication feeds, all broken out to allow readers to subscribe to as much or as little of my drivel as they please.
I now offer six different syndication feeds. The first three are various ways of getting actual weblog posts:
- Excerpts Only: The lightest feed available, this will only deliver a short excerpt for each post. You’ll have to decide if you want to click through to my page to read the full post or not.
-
Full Posts: This is the default RSS feed for this site. The full front-page text of each post (extended entries are not included).
-
Full Posts with comments: This is the most information-rich feed. The full front-page text of each post is included (extended entries are not included), along with any comments made to that post. Entries will update in your RSS reader as new comments are added, until the post scrolls off the front page of my site.
The second three contain various extra information: comments to current active conversations on the weblog, interesting links I run across, and my photography.
- Comments Only: Just the most recent comments to any post on this weblog. Handy for tracking discussions, especially after a post no longer appears in any of the three primary RSS feeds.
-
Eclinkticism: Syndication feed for my del.icio.us account. Short, sweet, and to the point.
-
My Flickr photos: Syndication feed for my Flickr photos. Ooooh, purdy!
All feeds are run through the Feedburner service in order to assure maximum compatibility and usability. Each feed will automatically optimize itself according to which aggregator requests it, and if anyone actually clicks on any of the feeds in a browser, rather than getting a page full of gobbledygook, they’ll get a nicely formatted page explaining what they’re seeing and providing them with a full complement of buttons to assist in subscribing them to whichever news aggregator they favor (try it out, it’s rather nifty — unless you use Safari, where this doesn’t seem to work…bummer).
(If you already subscribe to my del.icio.us or Flickr feeds directly through the respective services, there’s no real need to switch to using the Feedburner feed link — you’ll get the same information either way. Of course, if you do use the Feedburner feed link for those feeds, I’ll get more accurate statistics as to how many people are reading which RSS feeds, which makes me happy. Whatever works for you, though.)
“Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum, The” by Collide from the album Vortex (2004, 5:34).