RSS Syndication is one of the other interesting parts of web logs. Now that Firefox is released and generally available, RSS has become much more useful. RSS (Really Simply Syndication) is a method for people to keep up-to-date with a large number of weblogs. RSS Readers (sometimes called RSS Aggregators) take a list of web sites that make RSS available and periodically check each of these web sites to see if anything new has been posted since the last time the website was checked. I have been using a stand-alone RSS reader for a couple of months. The new Firefox web browser has a couple of RSS extensions that can be added in that does all the RSS work inside of the web browser. I’ve tried out two of these addins and have found that I really like the Habari Xenu news aggregator. It is definitely worth downloading and then importing all of the sample links (just follow the directions after download).

So, I’ve set my weblog up for RSS. If anyone wants to add the weblog to their RSS Aggregator, simply load in this URL:

https://www.rnsmith.com/cafelog/b2rss2.php

That page is set up to do RSS v2.0 aggregation. If you’d rather have RSS v0.92 aggregation (and only the true geeks would know the difference..!!), then use https://www.rnsmith.com/cafelog/b2rss.php as the link.

I’ve also got almost all of the kinks worked out in the email process. Only one more bug to fix and that is the process sends out a notification email everytime an email is received and loaded. It is supposed to only send out one notification per day so that I don’t flood people’s inboxes with irrelevant messages. Perhaps I can get that fixed tonight and then I’ll be done with updating the blogging software for a while. For source code management I’ve been using CVS (concurrent versioning system). CVS has great capability, but it’s also quite arcane to administer. You kind of have to know what you’re doing in order to be able to do anything, and the documentation for CVS is pretty sparse as well. For instance, one of the important tasks that I need often is to revert to an earlier version of a program. All of the literature talks about how important this feature is and the CVS liberature itself makes a big deal out of this capability. However, nowhere does it tell you exactly how to revert to an earlier version! It can be done, but you have to know how to do it before you can actually do it.

That problem is rife in the Open Source community. There’s lots of good stuff available, some of which I’d actually like to use. However, all of it assumes that the user is an alpha-geek that disdains actual documentation and considers it a badge of honor to be able to figure it out all by himself. That’s one big difference with the Microsoft Windows community. The source itself is hidden. There’s often only one program that will do the job and it costs real money. However, there is almost always good documentation and instructions. I guess with Open Source the trade off is no documentation and no money versus documentation and paying money. Often I’d rather pay some money and get some documentation!

So, back on topic of source code management: A newer version of source code managment called Subversion is now available and as soon as I get the final problems worked out with the email program, I’ll implements Subversion and migrate to that system. Source control has been very beneficial and I’m definitely a believer. I’ll be building a new web server in the next couple of weeks to take advantage of a lot of new software as well as to clean up half-finished stuff in the current web server. I intend to implement Subversion control on all the configuration files on the new web server. It’ll be interesting to see how well this process works!