Since I'd been ramping up to move my blog for a few days I hadn't really been keeping up on all the news going on in the Blog world. One of the big things currently (well, for a while actually) is RSS. One of the latest things being Mark Pilgrim's altering his RSS 2.0 feed to remove namespace elements and saying "Leave RSS Alone!" The thread of comments over there is pretty interesting. One thing I found particularly interesting was how various RSS aggregators handle various parts of RSS, specificly the GUID. It appears that most don't use it for a permalink for the post, instead using the LINK value. So what's the right solution? My opinion as someone not really that involved with the whole discussion is the software should change. While it is a pain in the neck on some level, I think the authors of the various aggregators should work to support RSS as the format is written.
The other big question is excerpts vs full posts in Mark's feed. While I liked having the full post, I can cope with just part of it. It's better than things like MacSlash.org, which just has titles. And in the case of Mark's blog, going to read the full article also means you've got all the comments right there (and many times there's a good bit to read in the comments).
Here's my other issue with all the stuff going on like this. For the most part I'm just someone who wants to be able to publish a feed of his blog. While I find things like RSS interesting I don't really have the background to know what is good or bad about it from a technical standpoint. I know it works well enough for me and is simple enough for me to gasp the basics of. I find a lot of this stuff kind of confusing (and I wonder if others in the same position as I do too). Does RSS work well enough? Should it do everything? What is gained by creating something completely new? Who invented liquid soap and why? I have no idea, but I figure I'll just wait and see at this point.
