Syndicate
One can hardly breathe a word about weblogs these days without hearing about RSS and content syndication. Syndication is all about making your writing available to others without them having to visit your site daily to find out what's new. Folks read syndicated content using so-called "RSS Readers," applications similar to news readers or email clients running on their desktops. Content is also picked up by "RSS Aggregators" who archive and make your content available along with the content of others in interesting or useful combinations. Blosxom supports RSS syndication of your blog by making a copy of your writing available as XML--as opposed to the HTML version that most folks will be browsing. Here's a snippet of Blosxom news as RSS:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- name="generator" content="blosxom/2.0" -->
<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape Communications//DTD RSS 0.91//EN"
"http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd">
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title>raelity bytes: blosxom</title>
<link>http://www.raelity.org/</link>
<description>The raelity bytes weblog.</description>
<language>en</language>
<item>
<title>Blosxom 2.0 is out!</title>
<link>http://www.raelity.org/archives/computers/internet/
weblogs/blosxom/blosxom_2_0.html</link>
<description>
I'm proud to announce the 2.0 release of Blosxom...
</description>
</item>
...
</channel>
</rss>
For the RSS version of your weblog, Just add index.rss (or ?flav=rss) to the end of any Blosxom URL. Here's the RSS version of a
Blosxom blog's home page:
http://www.example.com/blosxom.cgi/index.rssAnd this works just as well using Blosxom's paths and time travel. Here, for instance, is an RSS rendering of July 2003's posts on home repair:
blosxom.cgi/home/repair/2003/07/index.rssThis means that folks can subscribe their RSS readers not only to your weblog as a whole, but to discrete parts of your hierarchy that are of interest to them.