intangiblestyle

What is Atom?

The articles on this site are available in an Atom feed. What’s that about?

• What is Atom?

  Atom is what’s known as a ‘feed system’ or ‘syndication system’. It’s a way of publicising and finding out about new articles without actually having to visit the site publishing them.

  More technically, Atom is a pair of related standards for web resources. The Atom Syndication Format is a language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publication Protocol, or AtomPub, is a protocol for creating and updating web resources. I use the Atom Syndication Format to create the feed here at intangiblestyle.

• Why Atom rather than RSS?

  RSS is a time‐honoured family of standards for article syndication, each with their advantages and disadvantages. However, I didn’t want to advertise multiple feed formats, and Atom has enough advantages that it simply made the most sense.

• Is your feed available via Feedburner?

  Yes! Just click any of the feed links on this site, they all redirect to Feedburner.

• What if my feed reader can’t read Atom?

  No problem. The Feedburner version of the feed will automatically detect what feed formats are supported by your reader. If it can’t handle Atom, you’ll get RSS instead.

• Safari calls the feed RSS.

  Safari calls all feeds RSS.

• I hate Atom. Don’t you have an RSS feed?

  Ah. Sorry to hear that. Like I said, you’ll get RSS if your feed reader doesn’t handle Atom. Current best practice is to advertise only a single feed format, so I don’t provide anything else at the moment. But you could always contact me and ask nicely for a non-redirected RSS feed.

Subscribe in your feed reader