Daily Archives: 5/5/2005

News

RSS feed now available!

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Okay folks. I’m pretty new to this stuff too, so for beginners here’s what RSS is about:

Essentially it is a system of keeping track of information from sites that you like. You get a small summary scrolling along the bottom of the page telling you what the new stuff is on the site. In other words, it’s quite handy.

I keep mine scrolling on The Register, which is a great site for slightly techie news and usually fairly liberal ideas. It’s a bit UK-centric, but picks up on stories from all over the world. One that’s caught my eye today is this Dino missing link about a link in the evolutionary chain being filled. Ya boo sucks to evolutionists, or whatever it is the Americans say… My point is that I probably wouldn’t have visited the site and found a story that I’m actually very interested in, and that’s the point of RSS.

So, I know you’re begging to know, how do I get RSS working?

Well, I use Firefox to browse the web (more on that in a future post I’m sure) so I use this extension:

InfoRSS

They even provide it at a nice https domain too. Aren’t they good? It runs along the bottom of your browser window. Here’s one for your weird Internet Explorer people:

RSSreader

I have no idea if that’s any good because, like I say, I use Firefox so don’t need it.

Anyway, while looking at my blog, click whatever you need to to add RSS feeds and they should automatically pick up the options on my page. With the Firefox extension that I linked to, the way to do this is click the little orange square with white swooshes at the bottom of your screen near the RSS feed. You’ll get a few options; I suggest using the RSS 2.0, which is the feed of posts I make, but there’s one on there for comments too, and another one using Atom, which I have no idea about but it came with the software so I’ll leave it on 🙂

So, that’s RSS. Isn’t it nice?

Three posts in one day. This blogging thing could be addictive.

[additional note: while writing this I have drunk a very tasty bottle of ale, and only now noticed that it was 6.4% alcohol, so now my fingers have gone slightly tingly]

Stuff

Vote damn you!

1 Comment

Apparently only one third of under-25s in the UK are planning to vote today. That’s pretty stupid. Go and vote for someone at least. If you don’t then you rennounce your right to complain if someone you don’t like gets elected. Again. Not thinking of anyone in particular…

On a more fun note, everyone should go and download Copernic. You may have heard of Google desktop, well, Copernic is like that but without the ‘sending your data to Google over the web’ bit.

Basically, what it does it build a database of everything on your computer. How exactly it does this I have no idea. Surely we’re into territory here where a truly accurate map should be the same size as the place that it is describing? … Anyway, somehow or other it analyses your files and stashes this info away. If you want to find a quote from an essay you were writing last year you could type in the name of the person who said it and Copernic near-instantly finds every file on your computer that has that name in it. It also catalogs all your music and images for you. It’s customisable so that it can file extra data-formats by name too, so I’ve got it set up to log all my Flash files.

Why is this useful? Well, apart from the obvious ease of use, if you’re like me and have about three hard-drive’s data on your machine from where you’ve shunted it across everytime you upgrade your PC then you probably are stuck with several different filing systems. Copernic means that you can immediately skip through all the system stuff and get right back to the file you’re looking for without having to remember where you put it or wait five minutes for the Windows search to give you a result.

Yes, I know I’m going on about this, but I really do love this software and I never really realised before just how useful it would be. It’s also free, so that’s a huge plus 🙂

Shok’s been busy doing radio shows on http://www.sillygoth.com so the Mittens music isn’t here yet, but you got an animation yesterday so don’t be greedy!