Hayley’s LiveJournal

You know, there’ve been several occassions on which I’d have really loved to have left a comment on Hayley’s LiveJournal, but she’s set it so that only people she’s listed as “friends” can post comments to it, and she hasn’t listed anybody as friends!

But hey; now that I’ve mentioned this on my blog, everybody who knows us both will pester her until she fixes it. Winnage.

ATOM Feed Of Your GMail Inbox?

Checking my GMail account this morning, I noticed an unusual icon in the lower-right corner of the browser window:

Atom feed icon showing in a web browser viewing GMail

It turns out that Google‘s GMail service seems to be testing an ATOM feed – a kind of syndication feed (similar to those used by weblogs and news sites – see Scatmania’s ATOM feed) that can be ‘subscribed’ to from your desktop computer.

Right now, the GMail feed looks pretty bare:

ATOM feed from GMail

Nonetheless, this is an interesting turn of events – didn’t Google recently say that no other automated mail checking tools were to be used except for their own GMail Notifier (sorry, can’t find a news story to link)? But now it looks like they’re working on developing a format by which anybody can ‘subscribe’ to their own inbox (although probably only using a web browser – the non-browser-based XML readers seem to have difficulty with cookies, which are likely to be required.

It’s all interesting.

Atom feed icon showing in a web browser viewing GMail×