Zed Shaw has introduced a new syndication format called ZSFF. I think it is a pretty cool idea, because RSS is generally pretty shitty. As an author, it is hard not having control over your content- it being at the mercy of whatever RSS reader is going to fuck it up. Plus, I have a natural aversion to anything XML.
So, I've bought in. That's one of the key advantages to rolling your own blogging system- you can whip up something like that in 5 minutes and not worry about it. It was literally trivial to create the ZSFF feed. No libraries, no complex logic. Here's my entire index.zsff.erb file:
ZSFF 1.0 Author: Erik Peterson Title: subWindow Blog Site: http://www.subwindow.com/ Subtitle: Just another crappy programmer's blog Copyright: 2008 Content-type: text/plain <% for article in @articles -%> <%= article_url(article) %> <% end -%>
I've also built a validator. Here is the code as well, if you like.
Update: I've refactored the code quite a bit and packaged it as a gem. It is now available through the command:
gem install zsff