A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

I’ve recently posted a bunch of photos to my Flickr and Picasa accounts that I haven’t attached to any blog posts. I know a lot of people who read Naids’s Nonsense v2.0 rely on it to see new photos, so I thought I would just add some links here to those photo sets. Keep in mind that you can subscribe to my Flickr feed or my Google Picasa feed so you get updates when I post new photos.

• Red Wine Night
• Holiday Season Night Out
• The Cupcake Factory
• A Dinner Party
• Wilkie Outlaw Wing Night 2007

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve completely revamped Naids’s Nonsense. Microsoft’s Live Spaces served me well for the last year or so, but there was just too many things I wasn’t happy with. I’m not going to get into the details, but I’ve moved over to my own web hosting service on Dreamhost. The blog is now powered by the newest version of WordPress (2.1).

So what does this mean for my readers? Not much. I think the site looks a lot cleaner, and loads a lot faster. If you’ve subscribed to my feed using :

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NaidssNonsense

you don’t need to do anything – this is still the active address. If you are using the Microsoft Live feed address :

http://hemantnaidu.spaces.live.com/feed.rss

you should update it to the FeedBurner one now. If you don’t, you’re not going to receive notifications when I make updates. And if you just visit the site without using any of this confusing ‘feed’ stuff, you can still use :

http://www.hemantnaidu.com

which just redirects you to :

http://blogs.thinkingh.com/hemantnaidu

That’s all I wanted to say. Consider yourself upgraded to Naids’s Nonsense v2.0.

This is actually a housekeeping post, rather than a journal entry. It is just to ask anyone who subscribes to this feed to use this new link in their aggregator :

http://feeds.feedburner.com/NaidssNonsense.

I’m using the FeedBurner service so I can track statistics more accurately. If you haven’t heard of this service, I encourage any blogger to check it out. Here’s a little blurb from their site describing their service.

FeedBurner is the world’s largest feed management provider. Our Web-based services help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

FeedBurner also offers the largest advertising network for feeds that brings together an unprecedented caliber of content aggregated from the world’s leading media companies, A-list bloggers and blog networks and individual publishers.

Also, if you feel so inclined, you can check out my Technorati Profile.

As you browse the internet, you may come across little orange images with the text, ‘rss’, ‘xml’, etc. Those who are tech savy tend to know that these images refer to something called an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and can make the way you read news and articles on the internet a whole lot easier. Hopefully I haven’t lost any of my readers yet who think I’ve gotten too technical with this article. Believe me, I will keep this truly informative and keep the ‘techy geek talk’ to a minimum. The reason I’ve decided to post this article here, and not on ‘Let’s Get Technical’ (my technical blog) is that I hope it provides you with a new way of reading the articles you are interested on the internet.

I’m not going to get into its history, or the way RSS works, but I’m going to explain the way you can use it. Traditionally, users go from site to site with their web browser, looking for articles they find interesting. Over time, these user’s tend to return to the same sites looking for new articles to read as they are updated. These users will re-visit each of these sites, looking for updated articles, not knowing if the site has actually been updated.

This technique of getting your daily news fix works just fine, but can lead to you wasting your time looking for updates. Imagine if you ordered 3 books from 3 different stores, but didn’t know the exact date they were going to arrive. It wouldn’t make sense to go to each of these stores 3 times a day for 6 weeks until it arrived. It would be a lot easier if the bookstores would give you a call when each one arrived. RSS works the same way. You no longer need to keep going to each of your favourite sites to see if new articles have been added – With an RSS Aggregator (an application), your articles are ‘pulled’ from the sites who’s RSS ‘feed’ you subscribe to. So, all you need to do is open you Aggregator and all of your new articles will be there waiting for you. In fact, the new versions of web browsers have this functionality built right in. As you browse internet sites, a ‘syndication’ button will light up, notifying you that you can subscribe to that site’s data feed.

It’s rare for a website to not offer an RSS feed (or ATOM, a similar type of technology). If you like to read a lot of blogs, RSS is a great way to keep informed as to when each blog is updated. For instance, if you wanted to subscribe to my blogs, you would add :

• http://naiduworks.blogspot.com/atom.xml
• http://hemantnaidu.blogspot.com/atom.xml

to you aggregator (for those who are interested, click on one of the above links to see what a syndication feed looks like under the hood). The next time I updated one of my blogs, you would be able to read it in your aggregator, without ever actually visiting my blog. This works great if you read a blog where the user doesn’t post on a regular schedule.

If you want to give it a try, install one of the aggregators below:

• FeedReader
• SharpReader
• Google Desktop Sidebar

Once you get the program installed, all you need to do is add the link associated with one of these little orange ‘xml’, ‘rss’, or ‘atom’ images you see all over the place (there’s one at the bottom right of this page). To copy the link, just right click on the image, and choose ‘Copy Shortcut’. I’m not going to get into detail of how add the link to your aggregator, since each one will differ slightly. Check out the documentation that comes with the aggregator, or just ask me for some help and I’ll gladly provide some assistance. I just hope this article will motivate you to take advantage of these data feeds. I really think it will increase your productivity on the internet, letting you spend more time reading what interests you.

For more information on RSS, visit www.whatisrss.com, or on www.faganfinder.com.