Have you ever wondered what those little orange XML images () meant? Or maybe you’ve heard of RSS (or possibly even used it with something like My Yahoo) but didn’t really know what it was? Or maybe you just want to know the easiest way to keep up with many blogs and other news sources as possible? Then read on!

But if you are looking for the history of RSS or even a technical discussion of the format, then this isn’t the place for you. Maybe I’ll write about the history of RSS later. As for technical information, I would suggest just going to a spec’s and reading it. For technical specs, they are actually pretty readable (as long as you have the XML or even some HTML background, that is).

A Brief Background

The WWW started out static. You would point Mosiac to an address and you would get that page. Refresh it as often as you like and you would most likely get the same page. But people quickly saw the benefit in creating dynamic web content. With static content, once I’ve read the page there really is no reason to go back to it since it probably won’t change tomorrow. But if there is a site that I know gets updated pretty often, I am more likely to go back to it.

The first dynamic sites were probably news sites, like CNET.com and Slashdot.org, and places like the Washington Post. You could point your web browser to http://www.washingtonpost.com/ and see what the current news was. And if you checked back in 15 minutes, you may see some new news.

For many years, I had this routine in the morning and during the day. Start up IE and open up a few pages (like slashdot, my.yahoo, and CNN) and find out what news is going on. This was fine in the morning, as I probably hadn’t checked since the previous evening and the content has changed on those sites. But if I had a break in my work and wanted to check what news had happened since the morning, a lot of times I would go to those sites and there would be no new stories. But it would require a bit of work on my part to go to this page and see if any of the content on it had changed. This is especially true for a site like my.yahoo.com which is a news portal and has a lot of articles on it.

My routine has changed. I use a News Aggregator to get my news via RSS and have it delivered to my desktop. I’m currently subscibed to about 50 RSS feeds on topics ranging from what the weather will be, to the latest in tech news, to breaking world news. If you are interested in what I read, you can check out my BlogRoll. The interesting phenomena that we are seeing now is traditional media outlets like BBC and the Washington Post embracing RSS as a way to increase readership.

But if I am no longer going to these web pages to check for new news, how are the content providers generating ad revenue? More cutting edge content providers are placing small ads into their RSS feeds. The more traditional content providers use RSS as a gateway to drive you to their website. They just provide a bit of a teaser, enough to get you to click on the link and read the whole article. And give you an ad impression…

News Aggregators

So how would someone get started in exploring RSS feeds? The first step is to pick a News Aggregator that will pull the news to your desktop. Personally, I use NewsGator, which pulls RSS items and puts them in Microsoft Outlook for me. Since I spend 5 days a week in front of Outlook at work, this works really well for me. NewsGator also offers a free web-based service where I can read my feeds from any web browser in the world (and it syncs with my Outlook version).

Another News Aggregator that I’ve heard nothing but good news about it Bloglines. It is completely Web based and is supposed to have some nice advanced features.

My.Yahoo has recently embraced RSS. You can add any RSS feed onto your My.Yahoo page. This is really nice for people who are used to My.Yahoo and want to explore the world of RSS, but it lacks a feature that I think is really important: some way to mark an item read so you don’t have to see it again.

You can check out this page for more information on various RSS readers.

RSS Feeds to Check Out

There are a lot RSS Feeds out there. If you ever see a little chiclet that says “RSS” or “XML” in it, that’s a signal of an RSS feed (). If you use Firefox (and why aren’t you?), look down in the lower right hand corner and an orange icon will show up when you are on a page that has an RSS feed.

If you are looking for an RSS feed on a specific topic, there are a few websites that fit this niche. Feedster is a search engine for RSS feeds, and Syndic8 is more of a catalog of RSS feeds. Sometimes you can just put search terms into google and come up with them.

I’ve already pointed you to all the RSS feeds that I read, but let me call your attention to some of the more outstanding feeds. If you only subscribe to one feed, add boingboing to your list. It is a collection of random interesting links from all over the internet. A lot of the are technology focused, but there is a lot they talk about that isn’t. Of course you should read both my blog and Margaret’s. I’m also a big fan of rssweather, which syndicates your local weather forecast.

There are also two RSS feeds that are very cutting edge. They allow you to specify your Fedex or UPS tracking number and then create a feed with the tracking information in it. This way you always have the information on where you package is available on your desktop. UPS. Fedex. (both sites are unaffiliated with their shipping companies…)

If in your looking you come across a site that offers RSS feeds for movie show times, let me know. I’ve been looking for one for about a year and haven’t come across one (an haven’t yet gotten to the point of writing my own…).

In Closing

Hopefully this gives you enough information to start using and enjoying all that RSS has to offer. If you have any questions about it, feel free to add a comment below and I’ll try to respond.

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Margaret and I had been discussing re-doing her website and incorporating a blog. This was something that I had already done with another site we worked on, so I knew what was involved. So last night Margaret and I fleshed out what her new website would look like. She started out with a rough layout of where she wanted things and how she wanted stuff to look, and I sat down for about 90 minutes and came back with an example of my interpretation of what she wanted. Another 90 minutes of iterative design work and we came up with something she loved. Imagine that, a new website in 3 hours!

I did the Blogger integration for it this morning and went completely live with Margaret’s first post right before noon. So make sure to check out her new blog: Margaret’s Needlework Nook ().

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<>!*”#
^@`$$-
!*’$_
%*<>#4
&)../
{~~SYSTEM HALTED

– Author Unknown

How do you pronounce punctuation? You are probably already familiar with some of the pronunciations from your telephone: #as pound, * as star. And from e-mail you get @ as at.

But computer programmers have been at this for a long time. Punctuation marks have a very important role in writing computer programs and as an extension how computer programmers communicate. So they came up with some shortcuts. Like that ! is pronounced bang. Or . is dot. I’ve heard people call ~ twiddle. Yesterday at work we were discussing why Dave called $ String. My guess is that it was from basic programming, and a quick check of the ASCII entry in the Jargon File proved me correct.

So back to our poem. The transliteration of the poem is as follows:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

– Author Unknown

Read the full post of Punctuation Poems here: http://www.feep.net/~roth/geek-humor/misc/punctuation-poem.

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I wish I had written this. But Engadget did a much better job than I could have. So check out “HDTV Buying - Part 1″.

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One of my coworkers asked me an interesting question today. It turns out that he is going to a conference at Penn tomorrow and wanted to know if there was anything I could recommend for him to do on campus. Long story short, I drew a blank and was really pretty unhelpful. My first set of thoughts were places to eat (I tend to think with my stomach), but the conference is providing food for him.

• Get a Cheesestreak at Abners (if you don’t want to make the trip to Pat’s
• Get a nice meal at White Dog
• Go to the food court at 3401 Walnut (which I think is closed for renovation…)
• Check out the food at Houston Hall (which wasn’t nearly as nice when I was there)

The next set of ideas I came up with were more in the category of things prospective students would be interested in. He already has a masters degree, so those things really didn’t interest him that much either.

• Check out College Hall and College Green
• See Ben on the Bench
• See how cool the buildings at the Quad are
• See the Button
• Visit the Bookstore
• See Steinberg-Dietrich

At this point I was pretty much out of ideas. I ended up telling him to take the 2 minutes it takes to visit the Eniac museum in Moore before heading to the conference. There isn’t really much there unless you make an appointment, but it could be cool.

FOOTNOTE: About an hour after I had this conversation with him, I had another idea. The University Museum. When I was a student it was free to get in (which may have been because I was a student…) and had some pretty cool things and he is already at that end of campus. So I e-mailed him the idea.

HOMEWORK: If you are a Penn Alum, come up with what I missed telling him. If you are an Alum of another school, come up with what you would have told him if he was visiting your Alma Mater. Feel free to post your comments here, or just e-mail them to me. Maybe I’ll summarize them in a later post or something.

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Sorry for the long absence… I usually don’t blog on the weekends (and this includes long holiday weekends like this one) but I just didn’t get back into the swing of things after the break. I’ve got about 3 half-done blog posts that need to be finished and edited before being published. And I’ve got at least 2 more ideas for posts that I haven’t started yet! Hopefully I’ll finish some of these posts this week and you’ll get to see them…

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The Superbowl of NASCAR (The Daytona 500) is on FOX this Sunday at 2 pm. If you’ve never seen a NASCAR race before, this is an excellent opportunity to tune in, and I promise the race will be very exciting. FOX has an excellent crew working the race. Racing knowledge and NASCAR history coupled with interesting personalities and a bit of humor make for a great viewing experience. As a matter of fact, the Daytona 500 a few years back is what hooked Margaret and I on NASCAR.

So now you must be thinking, what is a “Thinking” man like Bill doing watching NASCAR? It’s all physics. Everything from how they adjust the suspension (round of wedge!) to give better handling in and out of the corners, to how much tape to remove from in front of the radiator (the balance between engine temperature and aerodynamics).

But the Super Speed ways of Daytona and Taladega provide an extra amount of excitement for the “Thinking” man. It’s basically Game Theory at 200 mph. All the cars on these tracks have a Restrictor Plate on their carburetor that restricts the airflow into the engine which has the effect of reducing horsepower. The main reason for these Restrictor Plates is for safety. Without them the cars can easily clear 200 mph and it was thought to be too dangerous for both participants and spectators.

Restrictor Plates also have the side effect of making all the cars have basically the same top speed. This means that you are never out of the race, and any one (from any starting position) can win.

The Game Theory part comes in to play because you can’t make a move without help. The cars all race in a single-file line and if you pull out of the line to pass someone, you lose your draft. The effect of this is that your car goes much slower and you start losing places to the cars in the line. If you can get some people to go with you (or if you go with people), you can form a second line and get the draft effect back. So it’s all about teamwork. Who can you make a deal with now that won’t screw you later (ie. Say they will go with you when you go, but then leave you high and dry to fall off the pace). But at the same time, everyone out there is trying to win the race. Very exciting if you ask me.

Of course I do enjoy the same things about NASCAR that our viewers enjoy. The wrecks. The fights. Retaliation. And so on. So I’m still human.

So give it try this weekend. If you don’t have the 3 hours to devote to it, just tune in for the end. Since all the cars are the same speed, nobody can pull that far ahead of the pack so it is still anyone’s race deep into the last few laps.

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Slashdot has a link to anarticle that indicates that Panera Bread is the largets provider of free WiFi in the US. I thought it was funny because I didn’t even know that Panera provided free Wifi! But the one in near us does, so maybe I’ll keep that in mind when traveling in the future…

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New trailer for the Hitchhikers Guide movie can be found here. It looks really well done and seems to go pretty far into the books (ie. it goes past just the first book). But this trailer seems to be a little revealing, at least to the point of telling you almost everything that will happen in the first 5 minutes of the movie… But I still can’t wait to see it!

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Margaret and I decided to try Applebee’s Curbside to go service last night. While I was waiting for them to bring my food out, I was thinking about other places that have curbside-to-go service and how that seems to be a growing market. I know that Famous Dave’s has it. So does Ruby Tuesday. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Chili’s or Friday’s had it as well.

Seeing as how I was a consumer last night, I could easily see why consumers like it. We got home pretty late last night and didn’t have time to cook anything, so we wanted to get something good and quick. Without their curbside service, we probably wouldn’t have done it because it would have required coming into the store and waiting for them to find the food in the back. It also makes sense for the stores, as it opens them up to a new market of consumers. Applebees has a dedicated server for their to-go orders, so it must be pretty popular. The empirical evidence that all the to-go spots were filled last night supports that hypothesis.

But it raises an interesting question. Do you tip the to-go server? And if so, how much? Normally, I don’t tip to-go people because usually they are counter people and all they are really doing is handing me my food. But this girl did a bit more as she ran out with my food, ran back in to run my card through, and back out to my car with my receipt. So I didn’t tip her last night (sorry!), but left thinking that I should have. I was thinking like 10%, since she’s not really a full server (she didn’t take drink orders, ask how my meal was, etc.).

Anybody have any thoughts on this? Leave a comment below!

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