18 Feb 2005
Some Blog Updates

Man, I've managed to get a lot changed today in my blogging system: much of which won't be noticed by you, the viewer, but which will make my life so much easier ...

First, the things you will notice: two new banners towards the bottom of the masthead. One is for Standard Time, an anti-daylight saving time bunch, and the other is the current moon phase.

The other thing you may notice is that I've restricted the number of stories in the current RSS feed (and displayed on the initial load of the homepage) to fifteen. This is down from twenty, primarily to cut my bandwidth usage a bit. I am starting to get some hits, and it's showing in my web logs.

But the one's you won't see are the best: and I owe a huge tip of the hat to Jan at Secular Blasphemy for it. But in a very indirect way ... in a post today he mentioned how useful he'd found the Google Toolbar, especially the ability to spell check his blog entries. Spelling being a particular shortcoming of mine, I'd love to have a way to spell check entries without using a word processor program. So I went and checked it out. Imagine my disappointment when I found that it will only run with M$ IE 5+ on Windoze ... I only own one Windows box nowadays - the rest are Macs - and I wouldn't run that invitation to viral infection known as Internet Explorer if Microsoft paid me. I'm a Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox user, and a very happy one, thank you. On all my platforms.

But of course, this piqued my interest, and lo! I discovered SpellBound - a wonderful Firefox extension that works exactly the way I need.

But what's even better is another extension I ran across called Feedview. This allows one to view formatted XML feeds directly in the browser, without the silly markup and with very little overhead. So the next time my aggregator breaks I'll have a handy tool to use in troubleshooting.

All in all a very productive day.

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