Automated machine-readable whatnots
[image: a rough impression of how an RSS file looks in Microsoft Internet Explorer]
to help you stay up to date with happenings here.

Specifics.

Gentle readers, if you already know all about RSS you may find the available feeds and some notes about them here. If you have no idea what I'm on about, there is some more explanation below.

At present there are two RSS feeds available for eldan.co.uk. They are both machine generated, and I don't have much control over exactly how they are formed, so please read my notes - the information will make them more useful.

I am also experimenting with a mailing list for updates. RSS has some distinct advantages over mailing lists, but if you don't want to install any software this is probably the easiest way to get updates.

Weblog.
Contains the first sentence or two of recent posts to unmarked nuclear warheads travel these roads. It has certain limitations: posts without titles are ignored, and posts do not have time/date information, so your RSS reader will probably give each post the date at which the software discovered it, rather than the correct time stamp.

http://eldan.co.uk/rss/diary.xml


Comments.
Contains the first sentence or two of recent comments on posts to unmarked nuclear warheads travel these roads. Date information in this one is bizarre—I think it ignores my time zone settings—and not in the right place to be picked up by all RSS readers.
I like the idea of being able to use RSS to follow comments, but please don't overuse this one (like checking every minute), because I have a bandwidth limit on my website. I'm nowhere near reaching that limit yet, but if I do it will cost me money I'd rather be spending on wine.

http://eldan.co.uk/rss/comments.xml
General.

Keeping up to date with a website like this one, which is updated often but not at a predictable frequency can be rather tedious. It necessitates reloading the whole page regularly, just in case there's anything new on it. If a discussion ever gets going out in the comments it gets even worse, because it's impossible to keep track of such things without frequent reloading of a page that may or may not have anything new in it. A perfect niche, one might think, for an automatic site monitoring system.

Such a system exists, and is based on RSS. RSS itself is not very illuminating to a human reader (you can take a look above - it's not incomprehensible, but less clear than the original site it summarises), but it's designed to be easy to write software for.

Once you have suitable software installed, you can set it up to regularly check the RSS feed for any site that offers one, and automatically notify you when there are any changes.

I have not tested a range of RSS utilities, so this is not a strong recommendation, but I can say I'm happy with the one I use: Feedreader. It's an Open Source project for those people who care, and it's free to download.

If you are interested in finding out more about RSS, here is some more information for readers, and information about creating RSS.

More.
Contact.
Feel an irresistible urge to interact more closely with the being that is known as Eldan? Fear not. Email is just a click away.


Copyright.
Important information about authorship, copyright and permitted uses for all pages hosted at this domain.



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