Chapter 3. Feeds Without Programming

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Thomas Jefferson

Now that you're set up with your own aggregator or reader application, and before we get into the horrible business of the standards themselves, it's a good idea to start creating your own personal feeds. Feeds are much more than just the latest news and articles from regular web sites. As you will see in Chapter 10, you can push all sorts of data through them. Chapter 10, however, contains a lot of code you will need to run yourself. In this chapter, we'll use other people's services to produce some interesting and useful feeds.