Saturday, June 24, 2006

One more thing

One standard is never good enough for anyone. Turns out RSS is the name of one kind of "feed." Apparently Blogger doesn't use RSS, it uses Atom. I don't know what the difference is. I don't think it matters. I was shocked after reading my last post to actually look at this blog and see that there was no link to our feed! It now on the side in my links and at the very bottom of the page too.

Let me know what you think of the new layout, too.

Update: Just looked at this under Internet Explorer and the sidebar is all messed up, pushed down to the bottom. I'll take a look at fixing it later. You should be using firefox anyway.

Confusion

Wow, one might think I was on drugs reading my last post. How embarrassing :). Let me try to clarify. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's basically a way for you to subscribe to a list of headlines from some website. Usually a column someone writes or a blog or a comic strip.

There are many different RSS readers out there. I recommended RSS Reader merely because it was the first Windows based tool that looked like Akregator (the Linux based tool I use). Basically, you look for the RSS feed icon, copy the link it goes to and put it in your reader. Then it will check the feed every so often and show you what new items have been posted.

Some of my favorite feeds are 101cookbooks (recipes I'll never make), the dilbert blog (he's annoyingly atheistic, but very humorous otherwise), lots of right-wing blogs (like hughhewitt.com and soundpolitics.com). Oh and each category on craigslist.org has its own RSS feed. I can't believe the number of dogs and cats that roll through the Free list (well, I guess I can considering our track record).

Hopefully I cleared at least something up. Oh, and maybe the last post will make a little more sense, though probably not. Here's a picture Emma made so you don't have go away empty handed.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Blogs, RSS, etc

I started to write this post to inform my family who might read this of what RSS is so they could set up an RSS reader and be able to see when I added more amazing new info. But then I started to worry about their free time.

I fired up KDE's Akregator several months ago to see what all the hype was about. I liked keeping up with http://planetkde.org and preferred it to my email digest of new stuff at slashdot. Soon, I started looking for other blogs I might care to read and found reddit.com, digg.com, oy! Sara made me stop sending her links. Now I've gotten into the blogosphere, instapundit, hugh hewitt, corruption chronicles, and more.

Not good for my daily internet overhead. But I can quit any time :). Anyhoo, http://www.rssreader.com/ seems to look a lot like Akregator (though if you're really brave, download Kubuntu and try out a real operating system).

Get me a shotgun for my birthday

I think I'm going to need it for this cutie. Oh, and I guess Google has started a beta of online web albums. I tried it out with some pictures of Abe and I at Disneyland. Check it out here. We'll probably add more later when we get around to it. Posted by Picasa