Dan Schnau

An Atom feed on DanSchnau dot com

As of yesterday this blog supports syndication by Atom feed. You can use this link to connect the feed to a reader.

I took joy in writing the code for this feed. Coding by requirements of a web standard is a much different experience than that of business-oriented User Stories.

Atom is a 'publishing format' which is a contract that says "I'll supply my information in a specific form, so external applications will know how to read it."

It's not common for applications to interoperate well anymore. Wouldn't it be nice if your Facebook feed also could read your Twitter feed?

Anyway to publish with this format, you publish an xml file formatted a specific way, then feed readers can read it. That's it.

My implementation isn't much more than a bunch of XDocument calls. Here's the gist:

I used some random samples around the web to get started, including this one on Wikipedia. I found that w3.org hosts a validator for validating RSS and Atom feeds. That was very useful.