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This entry is going to be very geeky for about four paragraphs, and then be actually useful to non-geeky people

Do you know what’s fun? Syndication. Syndication is always fun. It’s one of those topics that never ceases to enlighten, entertain, and educate. And golly, were every discussion in the blogsphere as calm and rationalised as those on Syndication standards, wouldn’t the world be such a wonderful place? Gosh golly and wow, it would.

It’s obviously in my interest to promote little-used syndication standards. I created one, after all. So I present the newest addition to the wonderful example of standards-based technology that is Epistula: CDF.

What Is CDF, I hear you cry. Well, CDF is a syndication standard invented by Microsoft for their content-push technology (Remeber, Active Desktop? Netcaster? All this vital information being delivered to your desktop? Wasn’t it wonderful. wouldn’t it be the next big thing? Apparently not.) It was, in a very real sense that Dave Winer would probably disagree with, the forerunner to the modern use of RSS. It even has a distinct advangage over RSS in the standards market, as it’s a W3C submitted standard.

So, Epistula now produces CDF feeds for everything it also produces RSS, RSS2 and ESF for (I love my module system). What use is this to you, I hear you ask. Well, if you are an IE user (And have IE as your default browser) you should be able to click on a CDF file (Like this one) and have it as you what you want to call it. Thereafter you will have a menu called “Aquarionics” in your favourites folder containing my last 10 items.

Actually, that doesn’t work with my computer, since IE6 renders it as a XML document, apparently that overrides windows’ ability to deal with it as a file-type. If your system also does this, you might need to do put this into a run dialog and execute it:

rundll32 cdfview.dll,Subscribe http://www.aquarionics.com/meta/all.cdf

But now at least I have one syndication method available that doesn’t require normal users to install extra crap. You can find all the various syndication methods (including feeds by category) in the Syndicate section.

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