And the winner is: RSS 2.0

G-Loaded! has always been a supporter of the Atom Syndication Format, more specifically of the Atom 1.0 Specification, because of its flexibility and extended features. Although this specification has been around for quite a while now, it has not been fully adobted by the major web indexing services or by popular web applications yet.

As you might have noticed, the Atom 1.0 feed link had been the first to be displayed among all of my feed links and, also, the first to be included in the web site’s HTML HEAD area, thus making it the default choice when external software tried to automatically discover the link for the site’s syndicated content. Moreover, about a year ago, I had published the article Design the perfect Atom feed for WordPress, which guided the wordpress user in order to convert wordpress’ Atom 0.3 feed to the latest 1.0 specification and how to enhance it with various features.

But, the arrival of WordPress 2.1 left me no choice. The support for the Atom 1.0 format, although planned for this release since a long time ago, has probably been dropped. Apart from this, Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer, which are two services I use often in order to check the status of this web site, still do not support Atom 1.0, but the old and deprecated 0.3 specification instead.

For all these reasons above – and a couple of minor others not mentioned here – the default feed format for G-Loaded! is RSS 2.0. Feed discovery should return this feed from now on in your browsers and other feed readers. Also, the link to the Atom 1.0 feed has been removed from the website pages. Of course it will remain active, but I strongly suggest that you use my RSS 2.0 feed.

This change will be permanent.

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