What's the difference between RSS and Atom feeds?

Hi,

This wikipedia article has some background information on the differences between the versions: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS (fileformat)]

Another question, can someone see that I have signed up for RSS feed from their site?

They can see that you access the RSS feed, but won't know whether you regularly subscribe or accessed it just the once (but obviously by seeing how often you access it they can make an educated guess).

Hi again,

but how do people decide which one to use for subscribing?

People can choose whichever one they want - Safari supports both RSS and Atom, other applications on OS X (and Microsoft Windows, Linux, etc) may only work with RSS or Atom so by publishing in multiple formats they can be fairly sure that everyone can read the content.

And how can you see who has subscribed to an RSS feed from your site?

They will be able to see the IP address of the requester in just the same way as they can when you load a webpage - there's no difference in how the RSS/Atom data is requested sent over the internet compared to HTML webpages.

...is there a way for me to see who has subscribed to my site?

Ah! Sorry, I'm a bit slow on the uptake 🙂

Your webserver should have logs of what IP addresses have requested the RSS/Atom feed files.If it's a server you directly administer, which webserver are you using (and what version)?

If your site is being hosted by another company, contact them to find out how you can view the server logs for these details - they should be able to point you in the right direction.

Hi,

For dotMac I must admit I have no idea. All I can suggest is to email .Mac customer support to see if someone can answer that question for you. I'd guess the answer is 'No' though 😟

And, as an aside, how do you put the quoted piece of text in a box the way you did?

<pre>>This arrow pointing to the right will indent the text</pre>

3 arrows will indent 3 times, etc etc.

If you use iWeb, you can subscribe with an external site, like StatCounter ( http://statcounter.com/). They will give you the html code to put into your site. iWeb 8.0 makes that easy now. StatCouter will keep track of who visits your site, although I'm not sure they pick up hits to the RSS feeds. I'm not sure how iWeb creates the RSS feeds and whether it would include html snippets from the main page. My guess is that it doesn't.

What I've done is inserted my statcounter code on my main page and on my first blog page. I duplicate my blog entry to create a new one (rather than hitting new) and it copies the code into each new entry.