2005-02-27

Technical notes

First off, the consensus response to the new blog template seems to be a bleah from the English speakers, a bljak from the speakers of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian (except for the few who are consulting Ham, Babić and Moguš to see whether that should be blatk or blj ak), and a whimper from the dogs. So I'll go back to the drawing board. This may have to wait for the next bout of insomnia.

Second, a brief promotional introduction to the joy of RSS feeds in The Guardian finally pulled me out of my Luddite torpor to go try it. For those who are not familiar with this gizmo, as I was not until about an hour ago, it is extremely simple way of using a software program to monitor your favorite news sites and blogs for new updates. Basically you find the address of the site feed and add it to the list in the program. That way you can just check the feed monitor instead of repeatedly visiting your favorite blogs for updates. Forgive my belated fascination, but I am a nonmember of the technical intelligentsia so these things come to me a little slowly.

I sampled a few programs before deciding that my favorite is the one linked by the illustrious Teekay, called NewsFire. It fits my criteria of being nice to look at, simple to use, and available as shareware. It would appear to be Mac-only, which is only a problem if you are not a Mac user.

The site feeds for this blog are http://eastethnia.blogspot.com/atom.xml and http://feeds.feedburner.com/EastEthnia, should you care to try it out.

3 comments:

Michael M. said...

I also only recently joined the RSS party. I'm currently using Bloglines (also mentioned in the Guardian article) and am very happy with it. It's browser-based, which means you can use it from any computer with an internet connection. Good stuff!

Eric Gordy said...

Aha, I'll have to check out the browser-based ones. Probably better for that time on the road

T K Vogel said...

Illustrous Teekay thinks: NewsFire very good. Just two things that bug me: it's kind of on the expensive side (considering that for five more bucks I can buy a full-blown, terrific word processor like Mellel) and it crashes on me quite frequently, the only application on my little machine to do so. So be warned -- but it's still the best out there by far as far as I'm concerned.