Those of you who pay attention to such things may have noticed that this weblog is syndicated in three different formats: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 0.3. Those of you who don’t pay attention to such things may very well have no idea what I am talking about; if you want to know more about what syndication is, and why you might find it useful, you can find a gentle introduction to Atom syndication—and links to tools and services that use it—at AtomEnabled.org, and a gentle introduction to RSS syndication—and links to tools and services that use it—at What Is RSS?. Mark Pilgrim sums it up like this: Smart bookmarks that tell you when your favorite sites change. There’s actually a lot more to it than that—as Mark knows, and points out—but that’s far and away the most popular end-user application for syndication at the moment.)

The reason, in any case, that I am bringing this up at all is in order to let you know that I’m deprecating the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds for Geekery Today. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons. Some of them are purely selfish, having to do with slow performance from MovableType due to the number of indexes it has to update whenever I add or update an entry. But there are good reasons to deprecate RSS quite apart from my own provincial concerns. One of the main ones is that RSS is a big, fat mess, and tools that are based on it face a huge interoperability nightmare in trying to deal with its maddening array of quirks. Atom is also better designed and better suited for use in weblogs. Thus, the RSS feeds are deprecated; if you use them, you’d be much better off switching to the Atom 0.3 feed at your earliest convenience.

Since I am deprecating the RSS feeds rather than discontinuing them, you’ll still be able to use same old URIs that you have in the past. However, I will be dropping the visible links to RSS feeds from the website, and—somewhat more importantly—RSS feeds will no longer be instantaneously updated to reflect new posts. They will be updated eventually; I’ve set up an automated script to rebuild the RSS 1.0 feed once a day, and the RSS 2.0 feed once every other day. I settled on this solution because I didn’t want to tax the server too much, and I figure that RSS 2.0 is about twice as much of a mess as RSS 1.0. The Atom 0.3 feed is still updated instantaneously, so if you want the up-to-the-minute news (and if you want to support open standards and non-lame technology) that will be the best one for you to use.

Another matter of little importance concerns the format in which Geekery Today is written and revised. XHTML is a great output language for documents on the web, but I hate writing in it. Fortunately, there are lots of humane text markup formats for the web; one of the best is John Gruber’s Markdown. I’m now using Markdown, which through a brilliant bit of Web voodoo can plug directly into MovableType, to write more or less all the content on Rad Geek People’s Daily. That doesn’t mean very much to you, since the Markdown is translated into XHTML before you ever see it. But it does have an interesting side effect: you can now use Markdown syntax to comments you post in the Talk Back section, which provides simple, intuitive ways to create *emphasis* (= emphasis), **strong emphasis** (= strong emphasis), [inline links](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#link) (= inline links), block quotes, ordered lists, unordered lists, and more. (If you know how to write an e-mail, you already know most of what you need to know about Markdown.)

Like all things in this fallen world, the system is not altogether flawless: Markdown is technically designed to be used along with inline XHTML, but you can’t use XHTML in the comments section. (If you try it, I’ve set MovableType to strip the tags out.) Still, nearly anything you could conceivably need to format a comment is available. Also, a couple of unfortunate side effects have fallen out of the way that MovableType formats comment text: (1) if you insert a URI in the text of a comment, it is no longer automatically linked—I had to disable this to keep MovableType from screwing up Markdown link formatting; (2) you can’t use the convenient angle-bracket Markdown <http://www.uri.com> syntax for linking to a URI either, because MovableType mistakes that for an XHTML tag and strips it out. That doesn’t mean that you can’t link anything from your comments; it just means that to do it you’ll have to use one of the explicit link syntaxes to do it.

(If you have a weird urge to experiment with Markdown syntax right now, you can try out the Markdown Dingus.)

—The Management

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

—George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

(recommended in an excellent post by Billmon)