In news you'll find a couple of new feeds including Treehugger, an environmental blog for slackers, and Parent Hacks, a tipsheet for parents. And you'll find a new news category: Lynn's Blog Empire, where I'm gradually putting all my feeds from my various far-flung websites.
Those of you who blog here, do you realize you too have an RSS feed that allows people to subscribe directly to just your own blog here without picking through everyone else's? Yes! You do. Go to your personal blog page (if you don't know how to get there, click on "all blogs" in the top menu bar and if you're logged in you'll see a link for your own blog), and towards the bottom you'll see a little orange XML logo. Click on it and you'll see your RSS feed.
If you didn't understand a word I just said: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. (It's a kind of XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language. Quick explanation: XML is a human-readable format that allows different programs to read and use the same information in different ways. It's cross-platform, which means it doesn't matter what kind of computer is using it.) It allows news-reading programs to grab a list of headlines and summaries (or sometimes entire articles) off of sites that offer an RSS feed. Why would you want to do this? Well, I monitor several dozen weblogs and news sites for information all day. In fact I've got 240 stories waiting in my news reader right now (the free NetNewsWire Lite for you Macheads). It's faster for me to scan those headlines and read just what I want to read rather than go to 60 different websites and pick through it all--much, MUCH faster.
Here at TNH we use RSS/XML to maintain the news section--basically it's a big shared news reader like the one I use on my home computer--and if you haven't played around in there you should. And there are many different ways that TNH puts out its own RSS/XML feeds into the world for other sites to use. Diary, for instance, has its own RSS feed, and that's how MamasInk.com gets its copy of Diary. You have your own feed if you blog here, and if you have friends who use news readers, you can point them at your RSS/XML feed and they can add you to their reader as well.
Anyway. More than most of you wanted to know, but I like doing a little eddifyin' now and again. 




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