Ask Dr Plokta

[drplokta]

I have set up a new blog, Ask Dr Plokta. It has a full RSS feed, so paid account users should be able to add it as a friend, if they are so inclined. Those who dislike technical neepery are unlikely to enjoy it.

"Why not use LiveJournal?", I can hear some people asking. I don't much like LiveJournal. It has a few nice features, but its usability is not all it might be, its default templates are pretty ugly, and its support for the latest bloggy features such as RSS and Trackback is poor-to-nonexistent. Also, since I'm already paying for a fully featured web hosting account, this way I get to have full control, not to mention useful things like backups.

Comments

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Good points - I was largely going on "It's polite to ask first" and acknowledging that I hadn't bothered.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Actually, I tend to think that if you have RSS, you don't really have to ask: it has no use other than to allow people to suck your content away. Though with Macadamia, you won't get the entire article because I only extract a certain number of words. Not because I don't want to syndicate the whole thing (I do), but because I thought some people might be offended by getting great long posts. I'd actually like two RSS feeds; one with a headline and brief extract, and the other with full text. So that people could choose.

I should point out that my blog does have some content that's not in the main feed -- especially comments.

[drplokta]

You can do that, you know. Make yourself a new template creating a file called something like fullfeed.rdf, then copy the index.rdf template to it and make whatever changes you want. See my notes above about Movable Type having better RSS features than LiveJournal.