RSS Feed

This site has an RSS feed, which is nothing more than an XML file containing the latest "headlines". This XML file can be read by a so called "RSS Client". The advantage is that your client can be set up to scan a lot of sites quickly and give you a listing of where you can find new information. So as soon as I, for instance, update my x2c code or Hania has invented something great and new in digital geometry, you'll see that in your RSS client, without you having to go check out our site every day just to make sure. This system is great for news oriented sites, but it really shines for small and infrequently updated sites like ours. It's so perfect for this that I could cry.

What you do is: get yourself an RSS Client; there are heaps out there. The one I use is an open source project and works just fine. You can get it at: www.feedreader.com. 

Once you have a reader, you click or pull or tweak or whatever you need to do to be able to add "a new feed". There you enter my RSS path: http://www.wehlou.com/index.rss

Note that if you are using the Firefox browser, you will see an "RSS" icon in the status bar below to the right.

Firefox RSS Icon

That's what firefox calls a "Living bookmark". If you click on it, you can add my RSS feed into your bookmark folder or to the toolbar in Firefox (see screenshot, below).

Living bookmarks in Firefox

I accomplished that with a special html tag in the common header of my pages. It looks like this in the page source:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Wehlou" href="http://www.wehlou.com/index.rss"/>

For the phpBB fora on the site, I've also got RSS feeds. These feeds publish the latest posts in the public fora, including subject and content. For these, use the following links:

General forum: http://www.wehlou.com/pubforum/rss.php

Knutby (Swedish) forum: http://www.wehlou.com/forum/rss.php

To increase the number of posts shown at a time from the default of 15, you can set a parameter "c" to anything up to 50, for example:

http://www.wehlou.com/pubforum/rss.php?c=50

And off you go. This is sooooo cool...

Do try this at home

You can find pretty good documentation at Harvard Law (I think they invented this). As a little example, here's the plain text content of my current (December 17, 2003) feed file (index.rss). It's so self-explanatory that you can explain it yourself. I also have made a really simple editor for these files, which you can use for free.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
 <rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
   <title>Wehlou: Code, Mathematics and books</title>
   <link>http://www.wehlou.com/</link>
   <language>en-us</language>
   <copyright>J. Martin Wehlou</copyright>
   <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
   <description>Math, computing and medicine, 
       out among the cows</description>
   <image>
    <url>http://www.wehlou.com/images/bannersmall.gif</url>
    <title>Wehlou.com</title>
    <link>http://www.wehlou.com/</link>
   </image>
   <ttl>60</ttl>
   <item>
    <title>Presentation Digital Lines (Hania)</title>
    <pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2003 16:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
    <description>A Powerpoint presentation of how to 
       digitize lines using modified
       Rosenfeld space, how to recognize digitized 
       lines and some pointers
       about Khalimsky space</description>
    <link>http://www.wehlou.com/hania/diggeom.htm</link>
   </item>
   <item>
    <title>Hanias CV ... better than ever!</title>
    <pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2003 16:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
    <description>After an interesting life 
       in Poland and Belgium, Hania is now
       active in the Swedish long-ago-capital Uppsala.
       Acquired more application knowledge. 
       Is deeply into digital geometry.</description>
    <link>http://www.wehlou.com/hania/cv.htm</link>
   </item>
   <item>
    <title>There's some code here</title>
    <pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2003, 20:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
    <description>Nope, there's nothing new or 
       earth-shattering, but I just wanted
       to point you there anyway. There's stuff 
       here on C++, on 
       Delphi and on fighting windows in 
       general.</description>
    <link>http://www.wehlou.com/Code/index.htm</link>
   </item>
  </channel>
 </rss>
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