Rodent Regatta

After all the wrestling with RSS readers and RSS feeds, I’ve discovered a couple of very fundamental gaps in my understanding. First, I don’t really know the difference between an XML feed and a RDF feed.

Second, I don’t fully understand why there are so many varieties of file names associated with RSS feeds. My own RSS reader lists literally dozens of file names that are all valid RSS feeds. Here’s a sample:

• index.rdf
• rss.xml
• index.xml
• index.rss
• ”anyname”.xml

There were also *.cgi files, *.php files and others. What makes for a valid RSS feed?

Third, I’m clueless about how to modify existing feeds to make them RSS 2.0 compliant. In fact, I don’t know how to add a RSS 2.0 feed from scratch.

Lots more to learn! Starting resources for digging into this are here and here. Though it may be outside their focus, I’m hopeful that Movable Type Pro might address some of the notions I’ve had about blogrolls and RSS subscriptions, although these wishes may remain outside the functionality of weblog tools.