Sephy’s Platzish

You’ll have to pardon the brevity of today’s post, but it’s all in an aim to bring better content to y’all

I’ve set aside today as a day to just write some blog posts in advance. That way, if I come to a day where I don’t know what I want to write about, I can post something that I have already written - it might be a how-to, it might be about something in my world. However, it will be me, and it will not sound like I’ve just started to write the post an hour before posting it.

However, I’ll throw in a bonus - a quick how-to. It’s from a list of things that I’ve been wanting to write up for a long time, and it is a fairly short one.

How to ’steal’ HTML code

I’m using “steal” very loosely here - it’s more like taking a peek at a snippet of code. I know that there have been many, many times when I’ve seen something, and wondered, “How’d they do that?” Well, all I did was take a peek at the code. The browser you use will determine how easy or hard this is. For all of these examples, I’ll use the US blogs blogroll from my sidebar.

Firefox

Firefox is definitely the easiest browser to do this in. When you see a snippet of a page you like, simply select it, right click, and click View Selection Source -

That will bring up a window that has the code from the part of the page you selected. In fact, the text you chose will be selected in the window, along with its code.

Then, you can copy the code and use it

Internet Explorer and Opera

Both IE and Opera do not have the same “View Selection Source” option that Firefox does (however I’m guessing that you can probably add it using an add on). For Internet Explorer, you need to simply right click anywhere on the page and click View Source. If right-clicking is not allowed on a page, then you can view the source by going to View -> Source.

This will open up Notepad and load the complete source of the page you were looking at. To find the part of the page you want, open up the search box and type in part of the page text you wanted.

In Opera, it’s slightly easier to do this, as they have a source reader built in. To access the source, press Ctrl+F3, or right click and select “Source   Ctrl+F3″, or go to View -> Source

You’ll have to find the text you were looking for by opening the Find Dialog - Edit -> Find… or Ctrl+F

Now, go forth and ‘borrow’ some code while I go back to walking and then writing.

This week’s Hump Day Hmm… is all about being a good neighbour. I am quite lucky to live in an area where all of our neighbours are good, apart from the odd bit of noise.

In the past, however, the story was slightly different - we live close to a bar, and before some circumstances changed, we would have issues with their patrons using our driveway to turn around in. We also would hear their music on the weekends quite regularly - I think that they must have been told to close the doors or something so that they weren’t providing the whole neighbourhood with a drumbeat.

On the other side of us, we have a group of folks who just like to keep to themselves, including ourselves. One of our neighbours is so good at it that nobody - not even the people living directly across the road from them - knows who they are (they also don’t have a name on the mailbox); all we do know is that they put up a teepee from time to time and have a small and quiet gathering there.

Generally, the most noise generated by the neighbours comes from them running small engines - lawnmowers, dirtbikes and ATVs - the last two in particular can get somewhat annoying when they’re run for hours at a time. However, we take it in stride and don’t let it bother us too much. The same goes for the fireworks that get done around the 4th of July; normally, we will go out and enjoy the show.

The noisiest neighbour, however, is one that I barely notice because I have lived her all of my life - the trains. They’ve been running through the same place they always have been for well over 150 years without fail. The biggest change since then (with regard to noise) has been the fact that they stopped using their horns about 4 years ago when they took away the level crossings that they had to signal for.

Interestingly, it was the trains that got me into two of my favourite hobbies - radio monitoring and photography. The radio hobby came as a part of a box that they put in about ten years ago that tells the crews the status of their train - number of axles, if there are any faults, et cetera. With the photography, I wasn’t as interested in taking photos of trains until around 2000 when we got a video camera, and then I started to take more photos of trains. They’ve always been a fascination for me, especially considering that I’ve seen representatives from all the major railroads go through.

Thinking back to college, I was also fortunate then to have some decent neighbours - they rarely were overbearingly loud - you would have to expect some noise since it was a dorm, and since I was in a quad with 5 people in it my first year, we had enough noise on our own to suffice. Also, where I was living was almost off campus, in fact, across the street could have been considered “off-campus”, with a slightly higher sales tax than on campus. The folks that lived over there were just as quiet as the neighbours here, if not more quiet.

As far as any advice I’d have to be a good neighbour, I’d say that if you’re holding a party, let the folks around you know, that way they can prepare - they might even let your guests use their land to park on if needed. Also, try to get to know your neighbours - you never know if they might be necessary to help you with a project or in an emergency.

A couple of notes - No, I’ve never seen the show that the title came from - we don’t have it on TV here (not that I’d watch it anyway), and Yes, I know that since I’m an American, I should spell neighbour without the u - just deal with it.

This guide isn’t intended for just the beginner blogger, or for the advanced blogger. It’s intended to grasp some of the issues surrounding one of the most used, yet somewhat misunderstood aspects of a blog - your RSS feed.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It, along with a type of syndication known as Atom, are the most common forms of distribution of content that is updated on a regular basis - such as a blog or news site.

Does my site have RSS?

If you have a blog, you should have an RSS feed already. In fact, if your blog doesn’t have a feed, it would be very unusual, and you should check with your blog’s administrator or verify your settings to make sure that your RSS feed is up and working. If you’re using Blogger, then your site’s feed will have an address like this -

http://{blogname}.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

A lesser known feed is the comments feed - that allows your readers to keep track of all the comments posted on your blog. The address for this feed is -

http://{blogname}.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

What can I do with RSS?

The possibilities are pretty much endless with what you can actually do with a feed. One of the most popular things you can do with a feed is have it republished through a service like FeedBurner, where you will get statistics about your subscribers, and what they click on. You will also be able to offer subscriptions by email - either through FeedBurner or through another service called FeedBlitz.

You can also use a service like Yahoo! Pipes to combine multiple feeds into a master feed, designed to give you just the information you desire. I’ll admit that I really don’t understand how that works in particular, but some of the pre-made feeds they have are pretty interesting.

The most common thing that is done with an RSS feed is having it read in a feed reader, or aggregator. There are a number of readers that you can use, both online and offline. Below, I’ll cover the ones that I have personally used.

Google Reader

This is the reader that I use the most often, and I suspect that it’s the most used web-based RSS reader out there. Its brilliance comes in that it is simple to use. For example, to add a subscription, all you need to do is click the Add Subscription button; it asks for the address of the site (not the feed) you want, and it comes back with that site’s feed, or a set of options if there is more than one feed found on that site. Click Add and you’re done.

Another feature that they have an advantage over other readers is that you are able to label items, either individually or by feed. There are some things that are still missing, but it is a “labs” product, and subject to revision. You can also mark items aside for public sharing, which goes on a sort of clip blog, made of your shared items.

Bloglines

This was the first web-based reader I had used, before switching to Google Reader. It is somewhat more complex to use than Google Reader, however, some of the basics are there - to add a subscription, you just click Add, give it the address of the site, and it will tell you all the feeds it finds.

Unlike Google Reader, you will be able to see how many subscribers a feed has - that can be useful in selecting a feed to go with. Also, there is a search function available. However, if you’re slow at reading feeds, or have some frequently-updated feeds, it will only pick up 200 items and then stop fetching more until you clear them.

Firefox Live Bookmarks

If you use Firefox, you will have seen this from day one. The “Latest Headlines” list (from the BBC) is an example of a live bookmark. For me, the most common use of live bookmarks is for sites that give you a list of current articles - such as the BBC headlines, or an NWS statewide list of warnings and advisories. However, I find that it’s not as efficient for blogs since it doesn’t load a site’s full feed - just the headlines.

That’s not all you can do with feeds in Firefox, however. You can also use it to discover and subscribe to feeds.

Discovering Feeds with Firefox

A somewhat hidden secret about Firefox is that you can use it to subscribe to a site’s feed in any of a number of feed readers - the default is Live Bookmarks, but on installation, you can subscribe with Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo!, or the offline reader you may already be using.

How it works is, when you visit a site, Firefox looks for a bit of code that says that this site has an RSS feed - it’s in the header information of the page. On my site, the code looks (in part) like this -

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Sephy’s Platzish - Atom” href=”http://www.sephyroth.net/feeds/posts/default” />

When firefox sees this, your address bar will have an RSS icon added to it; here’s what it looks like, with my address in there -

If you click on it, you will be sent to that site’s feed address, and you will be able to see the contents of that feed. At the top of the page, it has the option for you to “Subscribe to this feed using [Live Bookmarks | External Program | Bloglines | My Yahoo | Google]” - you can also tell it to stay with your choice to subscribe to other feeds.

If you select Live Bookmarks to subscribe, you will then be asked which bookmark folder you want the feed to be placed in.

Choosing Bloglines will take you to the subscribe screen, where you can choose your options for subscribing.

Picking My Yahoo! brings you to the “Add to My Yahoo!” screen, and gives you a preview of what the feed will look like on your page.

Finally, if you elect Google, you will have the choice to put the feed on your Personalized homepage, or in Google Reader. It’s a great feature, one that I use quite often myself.

Mozilla Thunderbird

This is the only quasi-offline browser that I’ve used recently (I’ve used others, but I believe that they’re no longer in production). I only use this for a couple of feeds, mostly out of habit, but also because it was the main reader that I was using to actually get the feeds until I found out about Google Reader and Bloglines.

One major advantage that Thunderbird has over the other feed readers is that you can set the frequency with which it checks feeds for new items. You also have the option of viewing items in the feed in their original state or on the actual site that it came from.

What can I do to let my readers know about RSS?

The easiest way that you can let readers know about your site’s RSS feed is to add a “Subscribe in a Reader” link, and button, to your blog. If you’ve already set your blog’s feed up to be served through FeedBurner, it is a very simple process - if you’re on Typepad or Blogger, it’s even more simple.

If you haven’t burnt your feed yet, you should - as I mentioned earlier, burning your feed will allow you to find information about your subscribers. Also (and this probably the biggest reason for doing so), if you decide to change hosts - say from Blogger to WordPress - having your feed burnt means that you won’t lose any readers in the migration (unless they’ve been reading you from day one, but even that shouldn’t be an issue if you follow some of the advice from Snos’ post).

Burning your feed is very easy to do; I’ve posted instructions on how to do it previously. Blogger users, you will also find instructions on how to have your site’s feed automatically use FeedBurner there as well.

To create your subscribe icon, start from your feed’s Dashboard (accessible by clicking on your feed’s name when you login), and click on Publicize.

In the Publicize screen, click Chicklet Chooser from the left list - or you can the link in the first bullet (click on “friendly graphic”)

Now, you are presented with a list of choices about as long as your arm. For the most part, you will want to take one of the first two icons, as that is, for all intents and purposes, the standard icon for feeds on the web. You can choose any of the other buttons, however, and the code at the bottom will update to reflect your choice.

Here is where it gets really easy if you are using Blogger or TypePad. WordPress and Movable Type users, you’ll just have to manually copy the code in the box and paste it into your template.

Users of TypePad and Blogger are able to have FeedBurner add the icon directly to your blog, as a widget. I’ve not used TypePad except to leave comments, so I apologize to y’all, but I’m sure the instructions from here on are fairly straightforward for you.

With Blogger, what happens is, when you click Go!, a new window or tab will open up and will ask you to log in to your Google Account, if you are not already logged in. If you are concerned about FeedBurner getting your password or username - there is nothing to be worried about as this is all done at Blogger’s site.

The next screen you will see asks you to confirm that you want a widget added by an external site. Here, you can (if you have multiple blogs) choose the blog you want it to appear on, give the widget a Title, and verify and/or edit the code that is being added to your blog.

To add the widget to your blog, click Add Widget. It will now appear at the top of your sidebar. You can move it around, or do whatever you would like to it now.

Further Reading
- Converting Visitors Into Subscribers - Are you getting as many subscribers as you could be? The tips in this article can be useful to try to improve your subscriber count.
- Why does my Feedburner Subscriber Count Fluctuate? - One of FeedBurner’s VPs answers why you usually don’t have the same number of subscribers from day to day.
- 14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog - Snoskred gives some reasons for why she’s been unsubscribing from quite a few feeds lately.

This week, I have some great posts for y’all, and I’ve added quite a few blogs about blogging to my Google Reader. It’s all a part of the week that was…

Posts I liked -

• Club Troppo’s Jacques posts a great insight into depression, from the inside
• Craig Harper has a great piece about Sitting at Life’s Train Station - don’t just sit there! Take a train to somewhere before your ticket disappears!
• Sydney Daily Photo has a photo of some plane spotters at Kingsford-Smith Airport.
• I don’t usually mention sponsored posts, but there’s a webhost providing free hosting for a full year - you can find more details at Untwisted Vortex
• From BlogAboutYourBlog, the Top 5 Reasons to get your own domain name

New Blogs I’m reading in Google Reader

• Blog About Your Blog
• More than Scratch the Surface
• Super Blogging
• ProBlogger
• I’ve Tried That

New blogs this week in the US Blogs community at BumpZEE -

• Unrestricted: My Nascar Rants & Raves
• Jottings From Jersey
• sharonb.net
• Mom Of 3 Girls
• juwanewa
• Midlife Perspective
• Blue Dog Meanders

This week around the blog, there were 161 visitors, down from last week - that’s an average of 23 per day; the slowest day was Friday.

Keywords -
how to hack blogger robots.txt - Boy, I wish I knew how to do that, considering that they’ve messed around with it without notifying us about that, or allowing us to change it.
raiders of the lost ark free movie - Now now, you shouldn’t be doing that. Nevertheless, it’s out there - but I’m not telling where.
drinking too much coke with meals - How much are you drinking? I would think that 2 cans (24oz, ~700ml) is way too much. I haven’t drunk any soda for over a month though, and I’m pretty proud of that.

This week, I had some fun with Google’s Hot Trends, discussed other forms of discrimination. I also brought up some memories of my trip to Disneyland, and celebrated my blog’s first anniversary.

Coming up: tomorrow, Snoskred and I will start a new feature - the Tuesday Think Tank, where we’ll explore an aspect of blogging, and ways to improve your blog. Snos will look at things from the perspective of the blogger and the reader, and I’ll delve into the technical side of blogging with how-tos and explanations of how things work.

This week, the focus is the RSS feed. I’ll have a discussion of what they are, whether you have one, and some of the really neat things you can do with feeds. Also, I’ll discuss how you can read other feeds.

Snos will be discussing what she looks for in a feed, and why she’s been unsubscribing to many feeds over the last few days.

Other than that, I really don’t know what I’m going to post about this week, so you’ll just have to stay tuned!

Sunday and time to recap the week of walks, and my journey.

Monday, 13th August

A branch that had landed in the middle of the path; I did move it out of the way - well, most of it as it broke apart when I picked it up.

If today is what walking will be like in fall, I’m all for it. It was nice and cool and there was a good breeze today, which made the walk very pleasant. I decided to do a “grand rounds” walk, where I walked the long path, up to the parking lot, then through the soccer fields, and then down part of the same route I used on Thursday back to the “out” path to the road.

Total distance - 6385 steps, 5.10km

Tuesday, 14th August

I think I’ve shown this flower before, when it was in full bloom; clearly the heat has gotten to it and it’s getting ready to go to see.

It had rained (again) overnight, but it had fortunately stopped before I went out to walk, and everything was drying out. There was also a nice breeze that made things a little bit easier, even though I was really tired. I went along the reverse regular route, and did the diversion as well.

Total distance - 5332 steps, 4.26km

Wednesday, 15th August

This is the scene from the shortcut path I take to loop back to the park entrance/exit. You can see the soccer fields in the background on the right.

It rained all day today, and I had other stuff to get done, so I decided to wait the rain out before walking, and by the time I went to walk, pretty much everything had dried out, and since the sun wasn’t out and it was after 4pm, I didn’t wear my hat. I took the regular route, with the diversion.

Total distance - 4946 steps, 3.95km

Thursday, 16th August

The sun sets over the road, making a great sight for the camera, but not a really good one if you’re trying to have any visibility of oncoming traffic.

This was the latest I’ve walked yet - even later than last Saturday. Of course, walking at 7 pm has its own unique challenge - not getting blinded by the sun. This is something that even the hat can’t do much to alleviate, the sun is that low. Of course, you then get further along and there’s no sun, which visibility a lot easier. I decided to do the long route, with a more standard return path to the ones I’ve been doing.

Total distance - 5830 steps, 4.66km

Friday, 17th August

The weed, posing for a picture. Ok, now that really sounds weird. Read on.

The humidity had finally gone away, and it was a really pleasant day - so much so that I chose not to wear bug spray, and survived the walk. I also decided to settle a bit of a score I had with a plant - we have these plants called “creeping charlie” (or “creeping jenny”), which only have a purpose of choking other plants. Well, there was one that was accessible from along the road, and I decided it had to go (just in case you’re wondering, this is maybe 100m from the entrance to the park, so I’m assuming this is on public property), so I started to tear it off of the tree. I then made the (seemingly) bizarre decision to drag it around for a while, as if it were a bit of prey. I decided to let it go in a place where it couldn’t grow again.

Total Distance - 5498 steps, 4.39km

Saturday, 18th August

Some flowers growing in the shoulder of the road, with a few drops of rain already collected.

The forecast today was for rain, and boy were they right! When I made the decision to go out to walk, the radar said that rain was about 15 miles away. However, by the time I had gotten done with filling my water bottles, and doing some other errands around the house, the rain had just started. As I write this quite a few hours later, it hasn’t stopped raining since then. Although I did have the umbrella, it was raining hard enough for it to start bringing a couple of drops through the top of the umbrella and drip on me - a minor inconvenience when compared to being completely soaked. I went along the regular route today.

Total distance - 4890 steps, 3.91km

Sunday, 19th August

A panorama of one of the corners in the park. Size: 1.14MB

Again, it’s been raining - I think it stopped for a little while today, but when I went out, it was raining moderately - they’re saying that we could have upwards of 5″ of rain overnight. The TV forecasts look like a forecast for snow with the amounts they’re saying we’re gonna get. But like I said, the rain didn’t deter me; nor did the wind or the fact that it was just over 15°C (60°F). The interesting thing is that with all the rain, when you’re in the forest, it is very loud, that you can barely hear yourself think. I’d share a video, but again, Blogger isn’t working, and I have no idea how to contact them to fix the problem like they suggest. I’ve used the “Blogger is down” option - that got a contact form…let’s see how it goes

Total distance - 5451 steps, 4.36km

In other news, I went to volunteer on Thursday, I won’t post a whole account of that just yet, I’ll save that for a post I’m going to write up for later this week. All I’ll say for now is that I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and met some great people.

I also managed to get all of my walks written up on the day that I’ve taken them. I’ve also been good on not staying up too late, though I haven’t been perfect. It’s just one more step on my journey.

This week, I’m going to work on making some good habits for myself - particularly in relation to this blog. I have had so many times when I get to, say, 9 pm and haven’t posted anything. My goal for this week is to have my posts all finished no later than 4pm. I could go later than that, but then I’m only giving myself the opportunity to faff around and wait until the last minute before posting. I’m also working towards being more organized than I already am - I’ve somehow managed to get my desktop down to a paltry 7 folders and the recycle bin - no shortcuts to programs, or web links on my desktop.