Frequently asked questions
What is a pheed?
A pheed is a photo feed, or rather, an RSS document that has been extended to describe photos.
What is rss?
RSS stands for really simple syndication. It is a document format used to share information. RSS is based on xml and looks a lot like html. At its heart RSS is simply a text document. Although most people create them automatically with scripts it is not difficult to make them with a simple text editor. The easiest way to understand rss is by example. Here is an annotated example of an RSS pheed.
I thought RSS was for blogs, why are you using it for photos?
RSS is useful for all sorts of things. People do use it to syndicate blogs and news headlines but it is equally as useful for communicating just about anything that can be broken into small units of information. We use RSS so we don't need to re-invent the wheel. It works and there is already a substantial infrastructure. RSS validators and desktop aggregators work with pheeds and a lot of software for manipulating RSS is already available making development less intensive.
Since a pheed document is a valid RSS document, a normal desktop aggregator should let you view basic information contained in the core RSS elements such as the title and description. Most aggregators, however, will not know what to do with the extended elements which hold photo-specific information so they will not show you the thumbnail or image. Some, however, like amphetadesk allow you to create templates to deal with unrecognized elements. We have successfully turned amphetadeskinto nice photo viewers. If you know of any others, we would like to hear about them. If you would like to see images in you RSS reader we encourage you to contact the developer of you aggregator and ask them to support this format.