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Oh, That Is So Fricking Cool!

Time for a quick update on how the ‘settling in’ to this new site is going.

There’s still quite a bit of work to do, but it’s starting to come together. You’ll still find some links back to the old site; you’ll just have to look a little further back in the archives to find them.

(No, really, go ahead and try — I dare you. Go read everything I’ve ever written, and find all the links back to Blog*Spot. Come on, it’ll be fun. I double-dog dare you.)

But apart from that — and importing all those comments from the old digs, which I’m pretty much ignoring for the moment — it’s going pretty damned smoothly. I’ve made a couple of little changes, here and there, but I think the coolest thing about my new software is all the syndication options I’ve got now. Hell, I even put a new section on the sidebar (called, dully enough, ‘Syndimacation‘) to keep track of ’em all. It’s crazy!

When I was on Blogger — way, way back a couple of weeks ago — I had an Atom feed, plus an RSS file that was badly-formatted, out-of-date, soon-to-be-history (because the host, BlogMatrix, was folding). On the cutting edge, I wasn’t.

(Well, okay, maybe for Blogger, I was. But let’s not poke fun at the old host, all right? Sophisticated or not, they were good to me for several months. There’s no need to be snarky.)

But now — now — I’ve got simply oodles of options for syndication. (Or syndimacation, even.) I’ve got the same Atom feed, but now there are two kinds of RSS output, plus a new beast called RSD. How fricking cool is that? I’ve updated every blog-tracking site that I could think of (plus a boatload that I didn’t think of, but were in the RSS Top 55 list, which I highly recommend) to use one of the new feeds. And while I was doing that, I found something really cool. And I can’t keep a secret for shit, so now I’m gonna tell all of you. But you owe me. Big time.

(Unless it’s not nearly as cool as I think it is. But I think it is as cool as I think it is, so I don’t think that’s gonna happen. At least, I think not. Or maybe I just think I think not.

Wow. Now I’m just dizzy all over. Forget I ever started these parentheses. What a friggin’ train wreck.)

Okay, so, the cool thing. It seems that My Yahoo (which I use as my home page) has recently started syndimacating RSS feeds, too. And they’ve even got an information page that tells you how to get Yahoo to pick up your own RSS feed.

So what does all this mean? Well, if you take a few minutes to add your RSS to their list, and ping Yahoo each time you post, then people can see your drivel right on their My Yahoo page. I submitted my feed, and then, erm, ‘subscribed myself’.

(Yeah, it tickled a little; please don’t try to picture it. If I weren’t double-jointed in a couple of key places, I don’t think it would have ever worked.)

Anyway, it’s way cool — there I am, headlines and all, right between ‘official’ news and the latest scoop on my favorite sports teams. It’s blog heaven, right there on my home page. You blog-slingin’ types simply must try it out. It’s a little like seeing your own name on a marquee or something. Only better, because you don’t have to go through all the trouble of sleeping your way to the top first. It’s really quite the timesaver.

And if you’re interested, make with the clickies on my ‘Add to My Yahoo’ button on the sidebar, and add me to your page, too. You can take top billing, of course; I’m happy just to be a supporting actor. It’s all good.

So, that’s my new cool toy. I’m sure the whole ‘kid at Christmas’ thing will pass soon enough, and I’ll be on to some other ridiculous thing or other. I’ll hack my content onto Salon.com, or find a way to make boobered the ‘Word of the Day’ in some online dictionary. Something like that. But until then, I’m gonna go stare at myself plastered all over my home page. Hey, it beats slow-dancing with myself in the mirror. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.