Update Your Bookmarks, Please

The short version for the geeks : my XML feed from now on is available through Feedburner . Please change your newsreader’s bookmarks:

• German feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GrinchDE
• English feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GrinchEN

Being “only” a hitcounter for XML feeds, Feedburner in addition offers some (amongst others, optical) brush-ups for the feed, notably the “SmartFeed” option, turning my Atom feed into RSS when needed. Format confusion like RSS 0.92, RSS/ RDF 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and in future Atom 1.0 left my page, only one German and one English feed remain.

I would have liked to use .htaccess / redirect and the available WordPress plugin to automatically redirect feedreaders – but unfortunately its not that simple when offering two feeds with just the difference of a language tag used in the postings.

Whats this all about then ??

By now, many websites offer their content in one (or more) special XML formats, most widely spread RSS . Common term for this is “feed” or “syndication”.

Main purpose is presenting content/ news not only on the webpage, but offering power readers the chance of using a separate application (feedreader, mailclient, webbrowser) or a web based service to easily catch up with different sources. Modern browsers (i.e. not Internet Explorer) signal feed availability additionally:

Firefox within the below status bar or Opera within the address bar.

I myself use Bloglines , a web service. Popular as well is NewsGator .