Ian Swenson .com

Besides my test posts which have now been deleted, this is my first real blog post.

I’m really only putting it up so that I can bask in my glory and savor the sweet victory that has followed such a messy campaign. Let me relate to you my tale:

It all started with a simple search on how to automatically generate RSS. For those of you who don’t know (which included me about 3 days ago), RSS is a simple news gathering format meant for the quick consumption of information over a wide variety of topics or websites. Essentially, it collects the main headlines from news/blog sources around the internet that you choose and places them in an easy-to-read format.

Now, I don’t use RSS personally, but it’s growing fast and I figured I might as well support it from the ground floor so I don’t have to totally redesign my website when I finally broke down to use it. However, as I found out, RSS is not an easy thing to automate.

It’s super-easy to hand-code, as easy as CSS-less HTML (it’s actually XML). But I didn’t want to hand code it, that’s not the point. Then everytime I made a blog post, I’d have to manually edit the RSS file–twice the work. So searching around the web, I found some PHP files that would take my HTML blog and scrap together the posts for an RSS feed. But it didn’t work well. It was an awful format and had all sorts of weird characters added.

So I found all sorts of other PHP and web-based tools that would do the same thing, but none of them would be essentially automated. All would require some action on my part.

Then I found WordPress. I actually found it early on in my search, but it seemed too tough to implement. Well, I decided to give it a shot, and it worked. But it made it so I was no longer hand-coding my blog file. Instead, WordPress did it all for me. Sounds great, but that meant I had no control over the visuals. I just had a stock blog page. Bleh.

To make an already too long entry short, I managed to spend another four-five hours tweaking the nine or so PHP pages that made up my blog. Chances are, I missed something, but we’ll see. I hope this works well for some time to come. It is much easier on me.