UserLand Provides Support for Atom Feeds in their Aggregators
This news is pretty important for a number of reasons. First, let me remind you that there are at least two major kinds of feeds out there: RSS feeds and Atom feeds. For a while, RSS feeds seemed to be the standard, then someone came along with an Atom feed. I’m summarizing and simplifying here because most of my readers don’t care about the nitty-gritty details. The RSS versus Atom debate gets really sensitive and has ruined many working relationships.
Dave Winer, sometimes called the father of RSS and a big advocate of RSS over Atom, founded UserLand. I’m not sure if he’s still connected to the company. Because UserLand has been seen as a leader in aggregator and blog technology for years, many developers look to UserLand and its products to get ideas about the future of blog software. Perhaps other aggregator developers will begin to support Atom feeds and other weblog developers may begin offering Atom feeds as well as RSS feeds. This movement recognizes the growing popularity of Atom feeds at the very least, if not actually acknowledging their existence and importance.
Manila, the platform this blog runs on, is a UserLand product. Supposedly, the Atom support module for Manila aggregators has been released. I am aware of a number of sticky issues related to the care and feeding of this blog server, but I hope the server administrators can and will install this new module. It will open our aggregators up to a number of feeds and blogs that use Atom, like Blogger blogs. There are a number of feeds I can’t subscribe to because this aggregator doesn’t like Atom. Goodness knows I need more things in my aggregator because I just don’t have enough to read already …
Noticed in Library Stuff’s feed in my aggregator
