Dan Gillmor: Blogger’s RSS Decision: Atom Only

In an effort to go completely overboard with Blogger relaunch stuff and get it out of my system, I now link to Blogger’s RSS Decision: Atom Only. I completely agree with Dan about this. It’s worth mentioning that Blogger’s claim, that different XML syndication formats are problematic for their application, is a load of crap. Forget for a moment the server farm argument that Dan presents in his opinion piece, and consider how Blogger works at a core level. They take post information, which is stored in a relational database, and then push that information through a publishing engine, which grabs your custom template and pushes your structured post information into that template in pre-defined locations. So they are already storing millions of different output formats (everyone’s templates), and publishing information through all of them, but they can’t support two xml outputs at the same time? If this is the case, they might want to revisit their application architecture. If you have an argument against something technical, present that argument, but don’t raise some fud argument that any reasonable, semi-technical person can see through. As a former Pro user, I can still publish good old rss. However, I cannot publish both RSS and Atom at the same time, and this irks me.