Blogger and RSS

Seems the new relaunch of Blogger gave people the opportunity to grouse once again about Blogger’s use of Atom instead of RSS. Fair enough. To add a bit more fuel to the fire, the dirty little secret is that the old BloggerPro accounts do support both. Notice how my feed is RSS, version 0.91, I think. They kept that functionality for the BloggerPro folks, while adding the ability to use Atom.

As and end user of syndication, I would like to see everyone offer both, that way I can stay out of the religious wars about which is better. But, the best way for me to do that now is to simply use an aggregator that supports both. Then it doesn’t matter to me what syndication format you’re creating, I can read it in the same place. That’s all I need. I think, if people really start voting with their feet, it’ll be on this end of the argument, going to aggregators that support both, not only reading blogs with one format. If I was going to get religious about syndication feeds, I’d spend the energy encouraging people to set up full post feeds instead of excerpts, that is way more useful!

By the way, as a follow up to the spyware, at this point I think there is a good possibility that the IE settings were ok, and that the user got tricked into clicking a popup. Haven’t tracked down exactly what the popup or prompt said, but that seems to be the regular MO for the bugger that started downloading everything else, appearing as a prompt, and then when the user clicks “no” appearing as another prompt about the site not displaying properly, and downloading when the user clicks that one. I’ll let you know if I find out exactly.

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