Tag Archives: Site news

Slashdot changed their RSS feed URL and never told me!

Sigh…

I just spent nearly two hours figuring out that Slashdot has changed the URL of their RSS feed. Their old RSS feed URL (http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf) generates a 301 “Moved Permanently” HTTP error. If you are using a browser, this will redirect you automatically to the redirect URL, which is http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot/to.

Continue reading Slashdot changed their RSS feed URL and never told me!

Yay for Google!

Google is supposedly about to start providing RSS feeds of their Google News headlines.

That’s great, and I guess I’ll have to switch over from using my own Google feed scraper program. Its been working pretty well for the last few months, but maintaining it has always been a bit of a pain. That said, I was also somewhat proud of the fact that it *did* work, and that it allowed me to have Google News on my site when other folks didn’t have this feature.

Its purdy…

I think I’ve pretty much finished this round of site design updates.

The key things I added/changed:

  • The overall theme: the main text block is now “flexible” in size, and that was the main thing I wanted. The theme I picked, the Ensellitis theme by Chris Ensell, was just about perfect. I made some very minor changes, altering a few elements of the left block and link colours and such. I don’t know why there aren’t more of these “free flow” templates- how many website visitors come to a site at 800×600? And frankly, my posts are too dang long to look “right” when scrunched down to 40 characters wide or so
  • I’ve added a “most recent comments” section at the left
  • I updated my banner image, adding a picture of Sadie in the process
  • and finally, I added a simple visitor stats block courtesy of Joe Cheung

Continue reading Its purdy…