Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Last couple of RSS things required. First, add the XML icon onto the top of this blog page and link it to the .xml file. That’s what’s used to identify a newsfeed to people with news aggregator programs such as SharpReader.

I’ve even picked an image to go with my RSS file. This image is often displayed in news aggregator programs. It’s my Behold discuss icon converted to a gif image file.

Finally, let’s advertise this new newsfeed a bit.

I am now getting close to 2,000 spam a day. I can still handle all that in 5 to 10 minutes with Mailwasher, but 1 day’s worth of spam is taking up about 5 MB of my website space. I’m sure other users of my web host must have the same problem, and my host appears to be working on measures to try to alleviate the problem. Just so long as they do something before I’m getting 20,000 a day!

After a fair bit of studying of RSS, I see that the basic XML used for RSS is relatively simple (no pun intended). My best bet is to write a program to scrape my own Blog the way I want to, and create an xml file in RSS format. I’ll pick RSS 0.91 since its specs are really all I need. … After an hour or so, I have a program to do so. It only took about 100 lines of code to do so. Verifying the result with an online RSS syntax checker, I quickly get the last few bugs out of it. Now, each time I update this blog, I’ll just have to run my blog2rss program to get a new .xml file to upload along with the blog. Required extra time: about 5 seconds.

It might be useful to outline what I found:

• RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers - This was the best summary of RSS that I found. Be sure to check out section 3: “What is RSS?”
• Blogs and News Aggregators without the Aggravation (and Only a Little Serendipity) - A nice summary of some of the best tools to find and use weblogs.
• RSSify at VoidStar.com - A service I looked at that I would have considered for scraping my blog, but it no longer is active. However, the php code it uses is available and is useful. Unfortunately, I can’t run php with my webhost, but the concepts were useful.
• How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer - This was my inspiration for writing my own blog to rss program.
• Raising the Bar on RSS Feed Quality - An excellent article that helped me polish the program.
• FEED Validator for Atom and RSS and RSS Validator - Then I used these to ensure my feed was valid.