Tech with a twist of lime! & FLHybrid Club.

 

Post continued after the jump.

What are RSS Feeds?

RSS (which, in its most recent format, stands for "Really Simple Syndication") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel", contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called a "feed reader" or an "aggregator." The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats:

• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)
• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
  
• RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats.

 

You may already have a feed reader; Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, Opera and other web browsers have them built in; Outlook 2007, Thunderbird, Windows Mail 7, and other email clients also include feed readers.  Even some operating systems, such as Windows Vista, have RSS integrated.

I also recovered 59,489 words from the previous incarnation of this site.  Some of this data will come across the front page shortly, but most of the information will go into a new category for posterity.  It also reminds me of why we should keep a forum, some of the conversations we had back then were priceless.

I, getting used to the new server, caused the errors and data loss here a few days ago, the new server is subtly different from the old one.  For instance, webmail won't work for me unless I tweak the address after I sign in (remember to submit a support ticket).   GCustom recently started offering web-hosting packages and the old host ported the account for me but there are differences between this server and the old one that I did not account for and when doing some of the maintenance that I do before posting, and I screwed up the site.   On the old server one of the tools would clean up a critical file and re-save it, it does the same on the new server but puts everything on one line, the content management system (CMS) doesn't like this, and the site stopped working.  This happened three times before I found out what the cause was (it looked like the addressing system of the CMS), the tool that caused the problem is built into the server's control panel and the maintenance is uncommon enough that I'll do it by hand in the future.  Now all that's left is to get GCustom to give us a test siteJ.

I am also thinking about making category icons to go on all the new posts, this will help to visually identify what posts are about before you start reading; the categories are listed in the new "Content Categories" menu.  If you have any suggestions for icon themes or categories, please let me know.

Registered users can also submit content so if you have something you think would benefit the other readers feel free to login and submit it.

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Alexander said:

I am also thinking about making category icons to go on all the new posts, this will help to visually identify what posts are about before you start reading; the categories are listed in the new "Content Categories" menu. If you have any suggestions for icon themes or categories, please let me know. You should use that G logo and the category name, it'd be a clean minimalistic look. Plus all the hybrid stuff would have leaves on it.

August 28, 2007

MONEY BLUE BOOK said:

Hey I dropped by randomly...like your header by the way...did you design it yourself?

August 29, 2007 | url

Kacey Green said:

@ Alexander, I like the sound of that. @ Money Blue Book, I've designed this site's headers in the past, but this one is only tweaked from what the designer gave me. The problem was, in the past I used Fireworks 2004 but it looks horrible in Vista, so I switched to Photoshop but it has quite a learning curve. This switch was right at the template switch . Thanks for the compliment.

August 29, 2007 | url

Alexander said:

I subscribed to your feed and that stupid box at the top of the screen hasn't counted me yet, I guess its on a delay huh?

August 30, 2007

Kacey Green said:

Yes, I think its on about a twenty-four hour delay.

August 31, 2007 | url

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