Getting started with XML, RSS, newsreaders, etc.

How can you experience Brian Flemming's Weblog? Let me count the ways.

XML, PDA, Kinja, Yahoo!, AvantGo--you name it, BFW now has it. I put all of the icons up at the top of the front page here, so they will stare at you every time you visit, mocking you because you don't know what a single one of them means. Except maybe the Yahoo! one. That one looks kind of familiar. But the others... "Ha ha ha," they scream at you. "You don't know what we are, and you're soooo dying to know but you're afraid to ask because everyone will think you're stupid. Which you are--stupid!"

Rude effers, those icons. Well, eff them. Here's a rundown of the unconventional ways you can use Brian Flemming's Weblog:

Subscribe to XML. "XML " is the option used by people who read blogs on a news reader instead of a web browser. The news reader I use is a great piece of software called Shrook (others). News readers offer a stripped-down, easy-to-browse way to see just the new content on a blog, instead of loading all the boilerplate graphics and everything else. Compared to a web browser, a news reader is a much faster and more pleasant way to power through a lot of blogs. In Shrook, this is what Brian Flemming's Weblog looks like in standard news reader mode: screenshot. If I want to see the web version of any entry, I can click a button and see it that way: screenshot. Some blogs only provide short excerpts of posts in their news reader feeds and make you click through to the Web version if you want to read the whole thing: screenshot. That used to be the case with BFW, until I started really using a news reader this weekend, and I realized how annoying it is to have to do all that clicking. The idea is to save effort, not create it. So the XML feed here is now proudly serving up full entries. Other terms you might hear associated with XML: "RSS" and "RSD" and "RDF" and "Atom." God knows what the differences are, but, fortunately, as near as I can tell, from a user's standpoint they all just involve using a news reader. News readers also can get feeds from content sites other than blogs, if you are into non-blog media. Whatever.

Add to your Kinja digest. A website, Kinja is a sort of "blog of blogs." Another way to look at it is as a news reader for those who don't want to learn how to use a news reader. You create your own personal list of favorite blogs, and Kinja will present summaries of the recent posts in those blogs for you in a more familiar blog-like layout. You can share your digest and look at other, pre-made ones. Here's my Kinja digest. I haven't finished adding all my favorite blogs yet.

Add to My Yahoo! If you already use the My Yahoo! service as a portal to internet content, you can now add XML feeds to your My Yahoo! The experience at My Yahoo! is a bit more web-like than using a news reader, and a bit more news reader-like than using Kinja.

View the PDA version. I didn't know how easy it was to provide a PDA-friendly version of this blog. I just copied a template, and, bam!, PDA version. It's the same blog, just without a bunch of crap you don't want on your Treo. I don't have a PDA, so I don't know how well the blog displays. You can let me know if you want.

Add to your AvantGo subscriptions. Turns out it was easy to create an AvantGo subscription, too. (Thanks, Meryl!) If you use AvantGo on your PDA, this is a way to get Brian Flemming's Weblog to show up with your other sites. It apparently doesn't cost anything to use AvantGo's free Palm software. Well, except you have to buy a PDA. Bastards. That's how they get you.

Through the magic of blogging software (Movable Type, awesome) all five of the above feeds and indexes get created automatically from now on. I don't do a thing except hit the Post button. It's amazing. It almost makes me believe in God.

Please let me know about any errors or omissions in the above (er, except the God comment; that could get complicated), and I'll correct them. Also, if there's some way to provide this blog that I haven't run across yet, and you want it that way, please let me know that, too. I am here to serve you.

UPDATE: A new, improved auto-bookmark gizmo for Windows Internet Explorer users:

Click here to bookmark this site

Is it working? (Thanks, Scott, for the help.)