Dear Friends,
I win, you win. Or something.
Alex manipulated me into creating an RSS feed for this very website, so that he wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of opening a browser window and clicking a bookmark. He wants my deeply absorbing observations delivered to him right this very moment, and he won’t accept anything less. He got me to do it with a low blow, too:
“Your resume says you’re an XML expert, but obviously you’re not.”
So I had to do it, and here it is. If you don’t know or don’t want to understand what that is, please ignore it. Otherwise, you will find it permanently housed in the little XML icon at the bottom of this page. Mark this day, as I am now syndicated.
Anyway, I’m happy about this. First, it’s a really geeky trick, so I’m proud. (Alex went on and on about how awesome Neil Gaiman’s feed was, until I looked and saw that Blogger provided it for him. Whatever.) Second, it forces me to write this in XHTML, which is good because my HTML can be pretty sloppy, and adherence to standards is probably a good thing when you do this for a living. Third, it inspired me to rewrite the data access for this site, so that what you are seeing now is no longer delivered to you directly from the database (which is occasionally fragile), but from text files holding arrays built from the database whenever I make an update. That means it’s faster, more stable, and dammit, it’s purty.
So now it’s time for the moment of truth. When I post this, it’s supposed to add it to the database, then pull all the records and create text files that run the site, then build the xml file to provide the RSS feed, then alert weblogs.com that the site has been updated, then give me a link to check my work. Deep breath.
Apparently, it works.
Jenni