I can't stress this enough. RSS has put so much coherency into my relationship with the world wide web. It makes my time on the web 90% more effective. What is RSS? How do I use RSS? Well, I think pretty highly of it, so I'll write down what I know.

RSS might stand for Really Simple Syndication (it might stand for something else, depending on who you ask). Basically, it's like a news ticker feed from individual websites. And your News Aggregator (AKA feed reader, AKA RSS Reader) reads this news ticker 'feed' and formats it into little headlines. You can read the headline and determine whether this is of interest to you. If so, you click on the link for the whole story. If not, you skip to the next headline. Generally, you can set up your news aggregator to subscribe to a any number of these feeds. When a site you are subscribed to changes, your news aggregator will let you know. So you don't have to check for new updates.

The news aggregators I use are Awasu at work, and FM Radio from socialdynamx at home. For people who don't use Radio Userland. I can highly recommend Awasu as a news aggregator. I've never had any problems with it, and I've been using it since August. It's got a very familiar Windows application interface. It's very easy to add and manage feeds. It also has a lot of other features

For a more explicit outline of how I use Awasu: I subscribe to about 30 different feeds. The major ones are Yahoo News top stories and sports, (take a moment and go to yahoo news. look at the bottom of the left column - see that orange XML graphic? That's a link to the syndication. Went you want to add a new feed to your news aggregator, that link is what you would point to.) BBC world News, I also subscribe to some geeky gearhead and technology sites such as Mobile Tracker and Gizmodo. A RedSox fan blog, my brother's blog, and other more personal type blogs.

I also subscribe to a site called Feedster. Feedster is a blog indexer and search tool. Like Google (indeed the design is quite googlish) , but for syndicated stuff. You can search for "Minneapolis" and get all recent posts with the text "Minneapolis" in the post. I've subscribed to that result. So, anytime anyone in the world posts about Minneapolis, it comes up in my Feedster feed. I've found a lot of blogs I now follow that way.

Finally, I subscribe to a some feeds through MyRss. Many websites don't put out RSS feeds, but with MyRss you can turn a website into a feed. For example, the GIS world seems to be pretty slow to adopt blogging. I can't find any GIS feeds. So, I put a couple GIS news sites into MyRSS, and it syndicates them for me. There are different configuration options for different costs. The free version, which I use, can have mixed results, plus it has a pop up ad you have to go through. But you can pay to remove that, and pay a little more to have someone customize it.  I've created two "channels" (MyRSS calls them that) Directions Magazine and GIS Cafe, and I've subscribed to channels other people have created, like Arseblog.

I had to write this down for people who don't know about this because I think it's worth it, or think it's complicated. If this is new to you - then let me say, it just seems complicated because it's unfamiliar. An initial time investment of two hours will pay off big time.

4:31:08 PM    

I dressed up for Halloween this year.

This costume was inspired by the film, "Dude, Where's my Car?"

11:49:09 AM