Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

No More Feeds for WordPress?
January 17, 2006

Let’s do away with the doom and gloom: In spite of recent context-deprived accounts, WordPress isn’t anywhere near ditching any of its feed formats. But what is all this talk about removing feeds from our favorite blogging tool? Let’s have a rational look…

WordPress currently supports four standard feed formats for syndication: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0 (aka RDF), RSS 2.0 (aka RSS2), and Atom 0.3. All of these feeds are at least vague implementations of XML, and allow applications (feed aggregators) to gather data about your posts without actually visiting your site. This can be done because these formats are machine-readable - that is, a computer/server can be configured to automatically visit your feed and parse out the data that it provides into usable chunks.

There are certain problems with the feeds that WordPress provides, and whether these really are problems depends on your perspective. But let me tell you what I see from a coder’s point of view, and why you should consider listening to my argument.

Not Good With People
January 16, 2006

It’s true - I’m not good with people. I get frustrated very quickly. Well, that’s not the whole pciture. I get frustrated with people who don’t try to understand why I would be frustrated.

I’ve worked at a couple of fast food jobs. When I was living in Johnstown, I worked at a Little Caesar’s. Here at home, I works at an Arby’s for a while. At both places, I learned to use the register. I would take customer orders, relay them to the workers preparing the food, take money and give change. Part of this job is obviously interaction with a person - the person paying - and that simply wasn’t for me.

I never really thought that I was bad at it. I actually consider myself a pretty good conversationalist with people that I regularly speak with. I guess I’m just not used to dealing with all sorts of people with different methods of making menu choices. The manager at the Little Caesar’s made sure that I didn’t often work at the register. It’s not like I was scaring away the customers, it’s just that I like efficiency when ordering.