RSS and Atom Syndication Galore

This week we've developed standards for RSS and Atom Syndication across all internal sites and projects.

It will take several weeks yet to implement the standards, and it was interesting learning along the way:

Regarding the choice and difference between Atom and RSS:

We opted to use Atom universally, since Atom is much more versatile, and both formats are widely supported. Some features we plan to use in the near future aren't supported by RSS, even though much of the web uses "RSS" non-technically to refer to both standards, effectively.

For developers looking to implement an RSS or Atom feed, these resources were useful in our search:

• Feedcreator: ( http://feedcreator.org/ ) - a no-nonsense PHP feed creator that supports several formats spanning RSS and Atom
• Autodiscovery: (http://www.petefreitag.com/item/384.cfm) - our man "Friday"! during a quick search, this blogger's entry made a quick distinction between rss autodiscovery (rss+xml) and atom autodiscovery (atom+xml)