atom feeds on asciiFx.com

So I'm in the initial steps of building the site and one of the things I definitely want to include is a blog. Couple different ways to go about that of course, but early on I thought it would be good to host the blog here on blogger and then syndicate to asciiFx.com (with links back to blogger, of course). Here was the thought process:

- I don't wanna deal with writing my own blog software
- I don't wanna deal with integrating someone else's blog software
- Something with (presumably) priority indexing on google would be nice
- I already have a swell RSS API I wrote for .Net 2.0 based on the RSS 2.0 spec

Earlier today I set up the asciiFx blog here on blogger and right away saw I had a problem ... apparently blogger doesn't support RSS. I don't know the reasons ... some research confirmed that Google actively evangelizes Atom over RSS. While I'm surprised they'd be hard asses when it comes to syndicating blogs ... so be it, they can basically do whatever they want, those wily, evil bitches.

Well, I've been meaning to learn Atom for sometime, so I looked for an open source .Net Atom API and came up with Atom.Net. A word of advice: It hasn't been updated in years, and in my case turned out to be a complete waste of my fuckin time.

Such is the life of developers ... so I wrote my own API in C# using the System.Xml.Serialization namespace. The 2.0 xml serialization namespace is one of those little-known, gnarly-in-a-good-way APIs that easily goes misunderstood or gets altogether ignored by the wider programming republic. If you haven't used it when dealing with xml, chances are you could be doing what you're doing better, much better.

My new Atom API works great so far ... and wasn't too much code, but it's definitely a work in progress. For example, I haven't taken the time to read through the entire spec (RFC 4287) ... and I'm sure my implementation only covers the basics. But, if anyone wants to take a look, I'll get around to posting it when I get set up in subversion ... of course, if you want something sooner, lemme know and I'll be glad to email it to you.

so, long story short ... up and atom fuckers!