Adding RSS

After the last site entry, I was trying to see if there was a way to integrate these posts into my Facebook profile so that friends and passers-by could read about my rants and thoughts straight from Facebook. A quick look through available Facebook apps gave me the usual Wordpress and LiveJournal ones, but those require accounts and blogs at their respective sites. Further down the page of results was a standalone feed reader/aggregator that I could add to my profile, but it required some sort of feed from my site, whether it be RSS or Atom. So, looks like it was about time I added a feed to my site.

With the current design of the MooCow engine, it was really easy to program a new RSS component into it. Everything is already in XML which really helped, and there are tonnes of examples of RSS in use throughout the Internet. One example I kept coming back to was the one run by my friends' own site (although I suspect that the SilverStripe CMS is behind much of the magic of that site to begin with).

I know I'm not the fastest programmer in the world, but the code changes required to add RSS only took 2 days of my spare time! That's really fast by my standards.

This was only for getting the Home/blog section up and running with RSS. I'm really not yet sure if I want to RSS-ify the other sections of my site (and even if I do, it'll only be for the Artwork and Writing sections), but if I head down that path that should only take me an additional day.

Now, time to get this post showing-up on my Facebook profile...