Little Joe's Atom feed.

I somehow missed or forgot that Joe Litton had a Typepad blog as well, LittleJoe - Joe Litton's brain droppings.

I was reading a post from his JoeLitton.net blog and followed a link in one of his post over to the typepad blog.

I thought, okay, if I want to check it out I can throw it into Bloglines, but did not see an RSS or Atom feed, just the Syndicate this site (XML) link, which is to a .rdf file, which asks if I want to open or save it.

Having no clue what a .rdf file is I cancelled and looked around a bit. I found a page on TypePad and aggregators, which appeared to say no RSS.

Okay, I now know that an .rdf stands for Resource Description Framework and that one can find out more in many places, listed below are a couple:

W3C
O'Reilly xml.com

I guess I am fitting the "management" role more and more. I wasn't out to learn about .rdf, simply looking at easily subscribing.

Didn't really see anything right off under resources on Typepad. They do have a Help area that might have some info in it, but I am not a member, thus couldn't look there.

I finally did what I often do when it comes to the web, I just tried something. I tried a few of the common file names that one finds associated with subscription files. Bingo atom.xml paid off. I don't need to look at the .rdf thing anymore, but if you want more info you can follow the links above.

I had also fallen victim to habit. Ouch, maybe I am fitting the "complacent user" role more and more as well. I simply looked for the feed on the page. If I would have simply put the blog url in Bloglines it would have found both the atom and .rdf and allowed me to simply click to subscribe to either one. Bloglines rocks! That method will probably be the first I take next time. I am guessing the .rdf file if downloaded would be used by many of the aggregators that one loads on the desktop. As I started with Bloglines, as it met my biggest requirement of keeping all things up to date for me in one spot, not having to load the software on each machine that I use was nice too. Bloglines comes through again, so I don't have to worry about the .rdf for now.