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3 Responses to "Feeder: Create RSS"

1. | Reply Will Benton
   Posted 09 Feb 2005 at 11:19pm #
   

   Instead of paying $24.95 for an application that writes RSS feeds, why don't you just hack up MovableType or WordPress to serve an RSS feed and no index page? Then your content would all be in a database and you could use either the blog interface or something like ecto to add entries.

2. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 09 Feb 2005 at 11:29pm #
   

   Sure, Will. I'll pay $199.95 instead for MovableType and/or install a system to use 1/100th of its intended purpose. C'mon…

3. | Reply Will Benton
   Posted 10 Feb 2005 at 12:03am #
   

   I guess I assumed that you already had a MovableType license, since you appear to be using it here. I must confess that I am ignorant of MovableType's licensing structure.

   As far as installing a system to "use 1/100th of its intended purpose," I wasn't being flip, and I don't agree with your assessment. I use and know WordPress, but I'm fairly certain that my argument is generally applicable.

   It's just a content management system; it gives you the model and the controller. What you do with the view -- whether that's putting it into a typical HTML interface, dumping out plain text, or serving a variety of syndication feeds -- is up to you. Furthermore (with WordPress, at least), you don't pay for features you aren't using. I've seen myriad kinds of sites based on a lightly-hacked WP install; some are using it as a simple CMS, some are using it as a "portal," and others are using it as a forum.

   Using WordPress buys you a few things that hand-editing a static RSS file (either as text or as RSS) doesn't, too: support for serving partial content based on ETag data, a variety of access interfaces (XML-RPC and web), a variety of feed formats, and a rich API for extensibility.

   With that said, perhaps your workflow is better suited to using something like Feeder. That's a matter of taste -- and, perhaps for an infrequently updated feed, hand-editing is fine for you. For my workflow patterns, the Feeder paradigm is clunky; I was trying to make a useful suggestion in case you found it suboptimal as well.