10.10.06

Code Reads and RSS

Posted in books, programming at 11:26 pm by danvk

I stubmled across “Code Reads”, an interesting new series on famous essays/books in programming. The first was on the most famous of all programming books, The Mythical Man-Month. I heard the book’s title many times before I understood it. The key was finding out that it was about software management. Then it clicked that “man-month” was a unit that implied a doubling of men meant a halving of development time. That the unit is “mythical” is an interesting statement about the dynamics of software development. So there you go.

I wanted to subscribe to the feed, but I couldn’t get the Code Reads without getting all of Scott Rosenyard’s ramblings about the Iraq War and Mark Foley. There was no clear way to subscribe to the just the “Code Reads” category. Google Reader had no options to filter out the articles I wanted. Neither did Feed Burner. I came up with two solutions:

  • Google Blog Search I searched for “Code Reads” on Scott’s site and subscribed to an RSS feed of the search results. This worked great, except that the feed only contained short snippets for each article, whereas the site’s RSS contained nearly-full reviews. Workable, but not ideal.
  • Ask dsandler, resident RSS guru. Through ways I don’t fully understand, he found http://www.wordyard.com/category/code-reads/feed/, which works perfectly.

I guess Scott disabled some category-specific feeds from his blog, but didn’t do a completely thorough job. Here’s hoping it stays that way!

1 Comment

  1. Scott Rosenberg said,

    October 11, 2006 at 7:25 am

    Thanks for the post and the links!

    I actually haven’t disabled any wordpress RSS that I’m aware of — I’m an RSS junkie myself. I think the category feeds are generated automatically, and the URL format is standard, which is probly how dsandler found this feed. Still, plainlyI haven’t done a good job of highlighting the URL for the Code Reads feed. I’ll remedy that soon…