My new addiction, as I said in my last post, is RSS. RSS means 'Really Short Syndication'. Basically, it's a way to get news articles, blog posts and that sort of thing without having to go to the site.
You use a program called an 'aggregator' and you put in the URL of the feed and it goes and fetches new content and you can read it in what-ever format you choose, regardless of the design of the site it gets it from.
Most aggregators also can read ATOM feeds which is good if you read a lot of blogs on Blogger. The only down side about using it for Blogger blogs is that the comments system is not 'syndicated' , so to post or read comments, you'll have to go to the site (which the program that I use takes you to the HTML page for the post when you double click the title).
Anywho, I use it to catch up on my favorite blogs and newspaper comics and things like that. It's very useful...
Click Here to learn more about this stuff. And search Google for 'News Aggregator' to find a program to view RSS and ATOM with.
-=The Prynce
"I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and you father smelt of elderberries!"
-Frenchman Taunter
"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
-Sylvia Plath
4 comments:
wow..funny that you're talking about rss, cos I'm a moron and I don't know what it is but I just signed up at bloglines yesterday and added feeds for pretty much everyone on my blogroll. I haven't even used it yet, I just signed up cos I saw that I've been getting hits from them. plus I ditched blogrolling cos their shits been going down way too much and it holds up my page from loading and I was like FUCK THAT!!
so I spent like 2 fucking hours transferring all the links from my blogroll into a list in my sidebar..blah blah blah..real interesting comment here, huh?
fuck I suck at commenting :)
You should use it. Its a bit of a time saver. Its pretty easy to get a grasp on after just a few minutes of use. I've never used Bloglines, though. I've only used a few RSS readers. One of them is an extension on Firefox and the other is called 'FeedDemon'. I could see the sense in an online reader, though. They're great for lazy fucks like myself.
I didn't know Blogrolling was causing troubles. Hm... Thanks for the warning, though. I'm gonna have to keep an eye on mine.
Things like Blogrolling are the reason I added a right side bar on my blog, though. I figured I'd put things that might slow my shit down or might not be compatable on that side so that by the time it tried to load, my main content would already be displayed.
I had a bitch of a time trying to decide if I should use the Blogrolling service or just make my own 'blog roll' but I decided to go with their service to make it that 1% easier.
You could have just viewed the source of your page after having it load with Blogrolling still on it and just copied the source and pasted it to your template. Would have been much faster.
You're no worse at commenting than I am. At least you stay mostly on topic. I almost habitually type anything I'm thinking at the time.
Not to mention the fact that anyone who takes the time to comment on my blog are the shit. :-P
-=The Prynce
OMG..I have to stop leaving comments when Im stoned :p
I HAD A POINT DAMNIT. but I never got there..
anyway. before I got sidetracked thinking about how long I spent fucking with my template making the new "blogroll"...
what I was trying to get at is that since I'm not using blogrolling anymore, I don't get the little notification (the "+" that used to appear by some blogs in the list) when they've updated anymore. so I wanted to get the RSS thing so I could get notifications instead of clicking every fucking link on my sidebar just to check for new shit.
one thing I dont get about RSS is that theres a lot of different feeds available for some blogs and I have no fucking clue which one to subscribe to. like a lot of them have 2 feeds available; one with a username at the end, and one without. I've been taking the one without.
and some of them look to be identical only they'll be one day apart. then I pick the most recent.
I should probably have read up on this shit a little before I started subscribing to 50 blogs. but yeah. no one has ever accused me of being reasonable.
FUCK. I cant figure out how to make a second sidebar. I wanted to make separate sidebars for me and tapeworm on shit thats fucked. I tried to copy and paste my sidebar and change the float to the opposite side on the second one, but it fucked my whole page. twas gay. every page I see that has 2 sidebars uses tables for pretty much they're entire layout.
I wish I could've copied and pasted my blogroll! but the page source doesn't show the urls of the blogrolling; its just script. I ended up right click, save link location and wrote the code in myself.
it was lame, but now my page loads much much faster. blogrolling has been going down a TON lately. its a great service, but it has been taking upwards of a minute to load my page on a cable connection when they're down. if I could find a way to keep it and not have the loading of the entire page held up by one broken link..
my god..I straight mini-blogged you :p
So that's what the "+" means! lol. I had no idea.
For most blogs on Blobber, use this type of URL: http://username.blogspot.com/atom.xml
That will give you an up-to-date feed with all the recent shit.
The second side bar is easy todo. I'm sure I'll make it sound more difficult than it is, but here goes:
Go see what the CSS style name is for your current sidebar. It's probably 'sidebar'.
Replace every one of those in the template with 'sidebar_l'.
Copy all of that shit in the CSS that says stuff for 'sidebar_l' and make a copy of it called 'sidebar_r'. You may need to change a few things in some of that such as if it says 'float:left', change it to 'float:right'.
Now copy all of the stuff that's on your side bar from the start of the DIV tag and paste it after all of the stuff in your template that comes after the main content part of the blog. Make sure its DIV style is 'sidebar_r' instead of 'sidebar_l'.
It should work then. If not, just use a table. (If it's fucking up, the right bar will come at the bottom of the main contents place.) A really simple one will work.
Just make sure you create the table just before the start of your left sidebar. Each section (left bar, middle, and right bar) will get their own column (which is the TD tag). Do not close the first row tag (TR) until you're also closing the table.
You won't have to use tables for your entire blog, though. Most people just figure if they're gonna do that shit, they'll go ahead kill some of the CSS and just use tables and shit.
If you can't get it, though, I'd be happy to do it for you. Just copy your template and paste it to a text file and email it to me.
Or if you'd like, I can send you a copy of my template and you can edit it to your liking.
It was a bitch to get set up at first but its easy once you get it done once. I had to do the same for Shannon. :-P
Hope I helped/can help!
-=The Prynce
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