I want to thank all of you who have written in about the new webfeed. Lots of you had the same questions, so I thought I'd answer some of them here (without posting the question), constituting a sort of de facto half mini-FAQ.

1.) The feed, just like the website, is updated once daily. But we’re on the west coast of North America, so the feed will not be updated until well in the afternoon, your time.

2.) The feed looks different in different RSS readers because each aggregator formats the feed in their own way. Some strip out content and add their own, others present exactly what we provide.

3.) I’m going through FeedBurner because that way everyone won’t be calling my host server for the feed. I only need to ping FeedBurner when I’ve updated and then FeedBurner provides the webfeed for all the aggregators. Everyone calls their servers, not ours. We save bandwidth, you get reliability.

4.) Yes, when I go away, things on both the site and the feed will either be updated sporadically or not all. Each case is individual, but I’ll let you know before I go.

5.) Yes, I do all this by hand. The creation of the website, the creation of the material on it, the design of it, the implementation, the HTML, the webfeed, the XML, the entire kit and caboodle whatever the heck a caboodle is.

6.) Yes, all the RSS readers listed at the bottom of the RSS webfeed page are free. The webfeed is free as well.

7.) The webfeed is designed for those who want the newest site updates in the quickest time. If you’re in no hurry, personally, I’d rather have you just visit the website. It’s a richer, more fuller experience than the feed.

8.) The links to the sites at the bottom of each webfeed item (Digg, Technorati, Furl, etc.) are social sites that provide news and fun items for the delight of others. So if you like a KeithSpeak, or a Meditation picture, you can send the item to the social site and it will be listed for all to see. In others words, you are discovering it for others to discover. It’s a nice thing for me. Some sites require you to join to submit.

9.) The reason why feed items might not show up in your RSS reader, is because your reader will think that you’ve already read the item, and the next day, when that same item is presented, may not think the material is new because it still points to the same URL as yesterday’s (KeithSpeak and Meditation keep the same page URLs, I just change the picture or update the page on the site, so the RSS reader doesn’t see it as "new".). In your reader, you will have to mark the items as "Keep New" or "Display older items" or wherever the equivalent would be in your particular RSS reader to keep all of the items coming up every time you check our feed.

10.) Uh huh, you must enter the exact URL of our feed into your RSS reader to subscribe to it. That means it's

11.) Ok, this has to be the last answer or I couldn’t very well call this a mini-FAQ (12 questions and you’re officially a FAQ; that’s straight from the Webmasters handbook; is too.). And the answer is: No, webfeeds are impervious to spam. In addition to no spam, ours are also ad free. Nice, eh?

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