My adventures in Real Simple Syndication

A couple of new technological developments here at The Infusion. First of all, I changed the comment feature so that (I hope) people will be able to leave comments without having a Google account. I added a word verification jobber to keep spam down. I don't know how those word verification things work, but they come up with some of the most wonderful imaginary words.

Second, over on the left, there, I've finally figured out how to include a widget so you can add The Infusion to your RSS feed. Don't I sound like I know what I'm talking about? Why, it was just a week ago when I was so naive that I just put my favorite blogs under "favorites" and clicked on them daily to see if there was anything new there.

And then...I read this blogger, Matt Cleaver, who had an entry entitled, I won't read your blog if... One of his top reasons was if you don’t have an easy-to-find RSS feed.

If you have a good blog, I can subscribe to it and put it in it’s appropriate folder in my Google Reader with three clicks. If you have a link to your RSS feed it takes about 5 seconds... I am much less excited to follow your blog if I have to hunt for the RSS address. You should always have an easy-to-find RSS link above the fold. Always.

This of course assumed I knew what the heck an RSS feed was. I left a comment admitting as such ("Is that the orange button?"), and he was very nice at directing an old lady (each year of your age is like 22 in technology years) to a video that uses very simple words to explain what an RSS feed is.

This, to the right, is the universal symbol for "I know more than you do about computers." Also Real Simple Syndication, aka RSS, feeds.

(I felt much better when the blogger at Tremendous News! (where nerdy meets cool. and then cool ignores it until nerdy finally takes a hint and leaves) confessed that "I barely know what an “RSS feed” is. I have subscribed to hundreds of them but don’t know where they all went. One day, I will turn on my computer and check my email and thousands of articles from 1998 will affront me and I will go into cardiac arrest. It will be the first RSS-feed-related death in the world, and my friends and family will be embarrassed to attend my funeral." That would be me. I pressed the little orange button thing, and then I never found the blog again.)

But now I am uber-cool, because I have saved all my blogs to Google Reader and I don't have to go clicking around to all my blogs any more because I know EXACTLY which ones have just updated and I save all sorts of time to read more blogs. And now I have my own little orange RSS feed logo on my blog so you can do the same. Aren't you glad you know? We may all be smug together now.