semanticnoise.com News Feeds

Every so often, a crummy Perl script I wrote will generate a RSS 0.91 file that includes the latest news items from the site. It's a cool thing to be able to do, which is the only reason I'm doing it.

You can also get this in RSS 1.0 if you like that better.

As of March 2004, I've added Atom 0.3 as another option. (It took a few minutes while I was watching TV...)

If web site syndication is new to you, let me briefly explain how it works.

Lots of sites have news items or stories, things that update regularly. It's nice to be able to tell other sites that you've updated your content. The best way to do this is to use a machine-readable syndication format which can describe the new item.

So that's what I've got here. Services like fyuze and software like Amphetadesk let you pick RSS feeds and build your own portal. Syndication services like Syndic8.com can collect news headlines from thousands of sites and make them searchable. If you're a web programmer, you can use these syndication feeds and automate linking to various sites you like.

In short, it's not that useful to the average person, but it's got a dork factor that I can't resist.

Validation

I'm pretty sure I produce valid feeds. Check my work here:

If the output for the 0.91 feed contains some noise like "Feeds must not contain SYSTEM entities", note that this is a bug in the validator. Stupid computers...