Keep Track of Mud Puddles' Changes

So I'll be the first to admit I'm an irregular post-ee on here. But I still love shooting out little messages of stuff I just find so ridiculous, brilliant, or novel that they must be shared. (Even if no one ever sees them, I feel TONS better).

But I'll bet it's a pain to come check here all the time, only to discover I've gone into hibernation again. I've finally got a solution for that, and it's brilliant! It's called RSS and it uses XML.

Woah, you say. What the #@*$ is RSS and XML. You're in luck, because I've recently gotten hooked and I'd love to tell you. Put simply, it's a new technology that allows you to keep track of new content on a website. Most major websites now offer this, although only 6% of web users are utilizing it.

Luckily, becoming one of the early adopters of this technology is not that hard. First you need a reader. I recommend either Bloglines or MyYahoo (you have to have a Yahoo e-mail first, I believe). Here's the best part of all: the reader you choose can tell you when all your favorite sites are updated, not just mine. That could include all the blogs you read or the news sites you keep track off. So in the instance of my site, you'll only have one place to check whether I've added anything. And that place will also tell you whether your Aunt Bertha and your cousin Ronny have updated their blogs, too. Plus get updates to the NY Times home page without having to scan their current page to see if anything is new.

These readers usually show a headline and then a summary so you can decide if you want to click to go to the site the feed is from.

Here are the steps to be the coolest kid on the block:
1. Get a reader (recommendations above). This requires signing up — not a download for the two I'm recommending here — and should take less than 5 minutes.
2. Then tell your reader you want access to this feed by copy-pasting this link in: http://wallowmuddy.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Please note that if you follow this link, you'll get a bunch of gibberish, something you'll notice on other sites offering RSS feeds. If that happens when you're trying to add other feeds, just copy- paste the address from your browser into your reader. Your reader can read what your browser thinks is an error.

Did I confuse anyone? Just holler if you want more details. Then rock this RSS Thang.