Late last night I made a small but important change to Comicster's three RSS feeds.

For those that weren't aware, Comicster provides (and subscribes to) three feeds from its online database:

These feeds give you the last 100 items to have been modified in Comicster's online database. They make it easy to see if something has been added that you might like to pull down into your own collection.

Anyway, last night I modified all three feeds so that they implement Microsoft's Simple List Extensions (SLE) to RSS. This is an open standard that flags each feed as a "list", so that RSS clients that subscribe to them can treat them differently. By definition, a "list" feed is a feed that doesn't grow over time (like a blog does), but instead always publishes a fixed number of items. So an RSS client that subscribes to any of the above feeds will know that it only needs to worry about the 100 items in the feed, and needn't keep any kind of history.

The SLE specification also allows for defining custom sorting and grouping in your feed, but that wasn't necessary for me feeds.

For more info about SLE, I recommend Microsoft's Team RSS Blog! In particular, Simple List Extensions Explained and Simple List Extensions in action.