12 February 2010

Small change to my RSS feeds

Ways of consuming RSS feeds change over time; so do my posting habits. On the one hand, I’m not posting as many short links as I once did, and I doubt that’s going to change in the near future (in part thanks to Twitter, in part because my blogging has changed, and that’s the way it is). On the other hand, everybody’s using Google Reader for reading blogs nowadays, and that user experience is somewhat different from old-school aggregators — articles are displayed at a glance instead of having you pick from a list (I know that there’s a list view, but who uses that?), and the result is more conducive to short posts. Plus, Twitter has also changed the way people expect to receive their content.

For all these reasons, I’ve switched around the way my feeds handle small posts and links: the main feed (index.xml, the one everybody’s following) will be updated with every short post right as it is published instead of waiting for a daily digest at midnight. And those who think that’s too much content in the RSS reader can follow a digests feed instead (replace index.xml with digests.xml), that works the old way.

Those changes don’t apply to my Twitter posts, which will still be aggegated once a day. Because it’s pretty obvious that, if you want to get my tweets just as I post them, you should follow me right where I post them.

While I’m at it, the Twitter account that alerts you of new posts on my blog is renamed to @garooRSS (people who already followed it don’t have to do anything, it’s the same account).