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Mainframe

Syndication


You need never miss new content on the Urban Mainframe. Our XML feeds will keep you up-to-date.

The Newsreader

If you're not familiar with RSS feeds you'll need a little help to get started. First, download a newsreader. My favourite is NewsGator, since it runs as a Microsoft Outlook plug-in which, as it turns out, is incredibly convenient and logical. If you don't use Outlook, then I understand that FeedDemon is a decent newsreader and it runs as a standalone desktop application. Apple users should consider NetNewsWire - I am unfamiliar with it myself, but I have heard good things about it.

Once you have your reader up and running, you need to subscribe to a "channel" or two. These channels are the data feeds from your favourite websites, among which is the Urban Mainframe hopefully. Because subscribing is slightly different for all the readers, you should refer to the application's documentation for the correct procedure.

Addressing the Feeds

In order to understand the addressing scheme used on the Urban Mainframe, we need to digress a little and understand (at least vaguely) how the website is structured.

On the Urban Mainframe, our content is organised into folders. Each folder can contain pages, images, forums, etc. Each folder can also contain any number of child folders. Thus, we have a hierarchical organisation of data, rather like the folders and files on your hard disk.

For the sake of brevity, the folder hierarchy is only ever 1-level deep as far as URI addressing goes. Thus, a top (root) level folder would have an address like "/folders/my_folder" and so would a folder which is nested a hundred levels deep. The web-server takes care of matching addresses to physical resources.

Still here? Great, now that we've got all that out of the way, we can summarise our feed addressing scheme thus:

Feeds are available from every folder other than image galleries and forums. The address of any given feed takes the form: "/folders/folder_reference/syndicate.rss" (remember, this is regardless of the folder's depth in the hierarchy).

Summary

So, to syndicate the weblog, you would subscribe to: http://urbanmainframe.com/folders/blog/syndicate.rss

If you want to keep track of new articles relating to Project Iceberg: http://urbanmainframe.com/folders/iceberg/syndicate.rss

The Colophon (why you'd want this is beyond me though): http://urbanmainframe.com/folders/wtf/syndicate.rss

blo.gs

I ping blo.gs every time I publish a new weblog entry. Those of you who use the blo.gs service can thus get automatic notifications of new entries via that service. Add Urban Mainframe to your blo.gs list.

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