RSS as a primary source of truth

18 February 2014 00:00 AEST

Meta

I’m experimenting with making RSS my authoritative source for blog posts.

I was thinking the other day about how RSS still seems to be the poor second cousin of most blogging platforms. Everything (well, everything civilised) generates RSS feeds but it’s done as an after-thought, not as the primary experience.

As a software engineer, I tend to consume most content directly from my RSS reader. I want that to be the most polished experience. I also want to be able to set a bunch of ifttt.com recipies for different feeds, including feeds of my own activities.

I’ve also re-jigged the BlogMonster library to generate RSS as its primary source of truth. It still works if you want to stick it on a web page, of course, but the underlying model is now a SyndicationFeed and your individual blog posts are SyndicationItem instances. You can, of course, simply bind those to a Razor view.

With thanks to the late Aaron Swartz, a source of truth in more ways than one.

Work

I'm Head of IT & Engineering at Etax, one of Australia's largest tax agents. Other interesting places I've been before Etax include Octopus Deploy, ThoughtWorks, Readify, Zap BI, Realex Payments and TRL.

I'm a fan of high-quality code, domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, continuous delivery and, most importantly, shipping software that works and that solves people's problems.

I have a number of small open-source creations, including Nimbus, ConfigInjector and NotDeadYet, and am an occasional contributor to several more.

I'm a regular speaker and presenter at conferences and training events. My mother wrote COBOL on punch cards and I've been coding in one form or another since I was five years old.