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Living in XML?

Danny O’Brien, among others, has been noting how many nerds have started piping as much of their life as possible through personal XML feeds, using stuff like RSS and Atom.

I’m intrigued by this, but, apart from the 100 sites I read each day in NetNewsWire, I’m only dipping a toe into the world of personal RSS. I get a feed of shows my friends are attending and Netflix recommendations, but not too much more. I know there's a lot more out there.

One thing I’ve really started to love is reading comments and updates via RSS and Atom (instead of email). I think Flickr is way ahead of the curve on this one: I can get feeds of practically anything, including recent comments on my photos, recent photos by my contacts or even photos by keyword. I’d love to see the folks at LiveJournal look at something similar. It’s a brilliant way to consolidate and “bubble up” information that used to require a lot of drill-down in scattered locations. It seems like the way things are heading, to be sure.

Anyway, I’d love to hear how you are using XML feeds in ways that you find productive and cool; How have you piped your life? Not so much the typical use of feeds for blogs and news—we all know about that. But how about personal calendars, reminders, work notes, and the rest of the administrivia in your life? Was it hard to setup? Anybody keeping a private blog? Let's hear about it.

Layman’s terms and links gratefully accepted, as ever. (Also: aching for the next round of that Atom vs. RSS [.91|1|2] breakdance fight? Take it outside, Boogaloo Shrimp. We're keeping it friendly on this street. TIA.)

Al Abut's picture

Ooo, what a great topic...

Ooo, what a great topic and some great responses in the comments. I've been looking to crow about my little tools - I have a few non-weblog feeds that make my life easier as a web designer:

  • Ben Hammersley's validator-to-rss: runs selected sites through a validator every time my news reader fires up, sends each error as a post, each site/pagecheck is a single feed, no posts mean no errors. Sites always start out with zero errors but can slip in and out of standards-compliance with time, especially with blogs, so this acts as a friendly alert system. I've actually even learned more about html this way, which I didn't think was possible after being in this game for years.
  • Job listings: totally giving away my trade secret here :) but craigslist is an awesome source of freelance gigs - each one of their job categories has a feed. Flipdog (a monster offshoot) also posts the more traditional type of job notices through rss and it's useful if crude - no industry, keyword or city parameters, just all new jobs in a single state
 
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