Fun with XML and RSS

[ Aug 02 2005, 20:43 ]

OK 'fun' is pushing it a little, but getting to grips with Google's sitemaps thing and RSS news feeds has been a good excuse for giving this ol' website a bit of a clear out.

And there's nothing like running a link-checker over your site to get the old chin-stroking fingers working. I found a few corking glitches in this site during my recent R&D exercises - nothing that would take away from a visitor's delight of course, just stuff that a full-time web sad-case would get excited about.

The problem with news feeds...

... is that you have to have some news. Creating an XML file that generates itself on the fly, as they say, is the easy bit really. After I'd got the MJB Data RSS news feed working, (which looks great using Apple's Safari browser by the way - thank you Apple), it didn't take long to notice that I'm not very good at the whole news/press/pr thing. Perhaps I should RSS this blog. I can feel a chin-stroke coming on. Hey - what about spidering other people's sites and converting their news into an aggregated RSS feed? Now that would be a bit of a one-man Google-esq mission. Later.

I know what your thinking

You're wondering how the mission to improve this site's ranking for the term 'web design' is going, am I right? OK well I'm going to meention it anyway and not because it's going particularly well. On the contrary, things have gone slightly backwards if anything and I can now find mjbdata.co.uk right at the bottom of Google's 501 to 600 results. However, as mentioned above I did find a few technical glitches recently, some of which may have been working against me in this regard. And I have thought of something cunning which I'm going to turn my attention to now. I'll be back.