On RSS

After my last post I got an email regarding my blog entry. An actual email! From a real person! One whom I don't even know personally! Talk about a miracle. Anyway, that's got my mind racing on ways to improve collaborative services over the net. Found RSScalendar.com a few minutes ago. Love the idea, being able to share your calendar with family and friends via a (an?) RSS feed. Shame about the execution really. It forces you to add a description for each entry and doesn't auto-adjust if the start time is later than the finish time. Not many quirks, but then I've only been using it for 5 minutes. I don't know why more services don't use RSS. How cool would it be to be able to check my GMail just by glancing at a feed? Sure, security's a problem, and I have no idea if it'd be possible to make RSS more secure than just simple plaintext, but it's worth thinking about. Feedroll.com's a great resource for this kinda stuff, it'll make an insertable javascript list of any RSS feed. I'm using it to put together a little personal portal whilst exploring the other possibilities of RSS. Seeing as how I'm hosting it all on Blogger while trying it out, and don't have my own server, it's an ideal solution. Must check RSS specs and GMail API at some point to see what's possible. Not sure I'd be able to do much with them since I'm not much of a programmer (my skills begin and end with QBasic, alas). Big shout out (God, I hate that phrase, but my mental thesaurus has given up the ghost for the moment) to Simpy.com for getting back to me about that last post. For once I got that warm glow inside that I wasn't just typing into an ethereal /dev/null. If you don't understand much of what I wrote in this post then that's probably because it's another geek-out. There may be more of these to come since the only thing I've had any feedback from so far is from my last geek-out post.