I have nothing to show for my time, but I have learned something. Here is the arc of my surfing for the past two hours:

Today was the day I decided I wanted to understand feeds. You know how all those portals have fresh news all the time? Clearly there’s something going on behind the scenes, something groovy and automated, ’cause no one’s hand-coding all that shit.

And when I installed MT, I ended up with that funny link on my blog: “Syndicate this site.” What the hell does that do?

Hey… lots of sites have feeds like the one on my blog. Many of them have an “RSS” icon.

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs.

In order to read RSS documents, you need a client (an aggregator) that runs on your desktop or in your browser.

Or you can display the stuff in a web page.

But how?

Hmm, if your page is PHP, you can run a little parser – like CaRP – to parse the XML RSS link and display it on your page.

But my blog isn’t PHP. Which means I need to learn some other way of parsing RSS feeds if I want to display news feeds on my blog… or (more importantly) on clients’ sites.

Ah, it’s late and I gotta hit the bank before it closes. Wish me luck in my knowledge hunt.

Ciao!
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