Feeding

I don't want you to get the idea that I spend my time poring obsessively over WalkyTalky's log files. Still, I have been known to glance at the "recent visitors" section of the stats pages from time to time.

Now, these stats are usually pretty uninformative, typically consisting of ISP pool addresses, locally referred, using MSIE, Mozilla or occasionally Safari; or else crawlers from Google, Inktomi etc. However, today a couple caught my eye because their agent identified itself as NetNewsWire, an RSS client for Mac OS X.

Now, I never gave much (or in fact any) thought to the RSS newsfeed for this blog. Movable Type comes configured to support RSS syndication in some way that I frankly couldn't be bothered to investigate, so I just let it do its thing. I certainly didn't test it because, well, in the first place I'm too damn lazy, and in the second, I seriously never expected anyone to use it. Ever.

As usual, my assumptions have proved to be wrong and someone is using it -- or at least, has done so -- and suddenly I'm panicking because they know something about my site that I don't. Naturally, I had to check it out immediately -- and what do you know, it's quite neat.

The good news is, looks like I don't have to do anything special to support it: yet another gold star for MT, there. The one change to my MO that would probably make sense is to write a slightly more useful excerpt than the one MT autogenerates -- given the rather meandering way my posts tend to be structured, the first 40 words may not really reveal very much. So I'll try to do that from now on.

I don't think I'll be using the RSS thing much myself, though; it sort of takes the fun out of checking your favourite sites if you already know what you're going to find there. Also -- and I don't know enough about the workings to say for sure -- from the XML it looks as if only the creation date for entries is reported, so I'd be worried about missing out on stuff (revisions/comments), and would inevitably wind up browsing the sites anyway. Still, it's an intriguing idea.

Anyway, if you are one of the pioneering souls who reads this via RSS, I would really appreciate hearing from you. Partly to find out why you do it, and what your thoughts are; and partly just to satisfy my burning curiosity as to who you are.

Actually, the latter goes for anyone reading this site by any means at all. Heck, I'd even have the search bots leave comments if they could :)
Posted by matt at August 27, 2003 05:34 PM