Did you know I have what amounts to four blogs on the web? You probably didn't. More than likely you are only familiar with this one; the one where I plop all my family updates and stuff. Truth be told this one blog is probably sufficient and I could probably figure out a way to consolidate all my other stuff into this one - but I kind of like the other ones I have and each has its own purpose. You might even be interested in some of the others. With that in mind I am going to tell you about each of them and then, possibly, introduce you to a cool bit of technology that will help you keep up to date on each that you are interested in.
My newest blog is at bits.rawlinson.us and it is a small "tumble blog aka tumblog" where I just stick interesting stuff I find on the web. Generally you won't see big long postings like this one there. Nor will you see much origional content by me. However, I will stick all sorts of stuff there that I think are interesting or worthwhile - mostly videos and quotes of other people. Generally I will be in agreement with the content or I will at least find it highly entertaining. The tumblog format is ideal for these kind of posts and it helps me keep the focus of this blog, primarily, on my family.
In the past I have posted some observational essays about politics or whatever on this site as well. However, overtime I have also been dual posting many of these to a site called Newsvine. Newsvine gets a lot more traffic there so my opinion can reach a broad audience, and thus, I get far more feedback from people there. I won't say I like the direction Newsvine has been heading in lately (as far as the belligerent and rude crowd goes) but overall there are still a lot of bright people there who give back some great comments and criticisims of my opinions that help me figure out where I really stand on the issue. I've actually had the headlines of things I put on newsvine being shown on the homepage of this site for a long time as well.
Way back when I first started this blog I had about as many technically jaron laced posts as I did personal ones yet the majority of my audience wasn't that interested in my tech postings so I ended up starting a second blog In The Trenches that deals almost entirely with more technical stuff relating to my job. That blog is still going strong though, at times, I get as bad about posting there as I do here.
The reason I decided to write this post was because I want to find a way to share the stuff in my tumblog with the people who also read this blog - or at least give my readers a chance to opt into seeing what I've recently discovered. However, there isn't a clean cut easy way for me to integrate the tumblog with the automatic emails that get sent by this site and I really don't want to spam anyone with additional emails. In fact, I don't really like spamming your inbox with my blog updates all that much either. I'd rather help you read my blog(s) at your leisure without getting in your way at all. Fortunately there is a technology that solves this specific problem and does it well; it's called RSS. RSS is a "news feed" where each item I post on any of my blogs would be considered a news item. So, basically, you could subscribe to any of my blogs (or really any blog at all) and use that news feed to keep up with the blogs content without ever having to actually visit the blog.
Basically each blog has a unique web address for it's news feed. So, for instance, this blogs news feed is at . This address can then be used with a feed reader, like Google Reader, to organize and track all of the news feeds you are interested in. You'd be amazed at how many sites (almost everyone I go to) have a news feed. I use Google Reader to track all of the feeds I like to read (about 100). The thing is you don't have to read everything that comes through in every feed - I just skim the contents till I see an article I'm interested in then read it, and then mark the rest as "read" and move on. It is a really great system.
Some of you may already be familiar with RSS - in fact I already have five people who are subscribed to my feed and that's without me having any advertisement for it at all. However, if you aren't, even if you don't want to subscribe to any of my feeds, I'd suggest you explore it a little. The technology, in the long run, will make your life on the net a bit easier.
Here are my various news feeds.
- This Site
- Tumblog
- Tech Blog
- Newsvine
You can subscribe to each or all of these in your feed reader and then categorize them all as "Bills Stuff" or something and viola you have all my writings on the web in one handy place that you can go to at your leisure and read. If you need any help getting this setup please just let me know and I'll be glad to help.