Zed Shaw has introduced a new syndication format called ZSFF. I think it is a pretty cool idea, because RSS is generally pretty shitty. As an author, it is hard not having control over your content- it being at the mercy of whatever RSS reader is going to fuck it up. Plus, I have a natural aversion to anything XML.
So, I've bought in. That's one of the key advantages to rolling your own blogging system- you can whip up something like that in 5 minutes and not worry about it. It was literally trivial to create the ZSFF feed. No libraries, no complex logic. Here's my entire index.zsff.erb file:
ZSFF 1.0
Author: Erik Peterson
Title: subWindow Blog
Site: http://www.subwindow.com/
Subtitle: Just another crappy programmer's blog
Copyright: 2008
Content-type: text/plain
<% for article in @articles -%>
<%= article_url(article) %>
<% end -%>
I've also built a validator. Here is the code as well, if you like.
Update: I've refactored the code quite a bit and packaged it as a gem. It'll be available on RubyForge in a day or so. In the mean time, if you've got git you can:
git-clone http://code.subwindow.com/zssf.git
Or you can grab the gem and install it manually by:
wget http://code.subwindow.com/zsff-1.0.0.gem && sudo gem install zsff-1.0.0.gem