If it wasn’t clear by now, I’m pretty addicted to RSS. Some people disagree, and see RSS as evil because of the extra traffic that active polling of the feeds introduces. To me, it’s the easiest way of publishing news, anyone can set up a feed on about any host, and because of the polling nature it allows for easier scripting than other solutions. Besides, with web-based solutions like Google Reader, the extra traffic can be shared across many users anyway.

The only frustration I am left with is that not every webpage or software package that interests me has an RSS feed. I wrote AtoMail to have an RSS feed of projects (or webpages) that have mailinglists instead of RSS feeds. In addition to this script, I just released a script called SVNFeed, which I use to monitor Subversion activity of projects that don’t have an RSS-enabled Subversion Web interface. By monitoring the tags dir of a project, I can even get a more coarse grained granularity of updates, mostly up to the release.

Both scripts might be consolidated in the future, possibly together with even more RSS generation scripts I have lying around ;–)