I learned an important lesson a few years back when my sister-in-law Rebecca brought piles and piles of variety to our shared Thanksgiving table. We already had turkey, mashed potatos, stuffing, gravy, rolls, and maybe a side of green beans, but with her contributions the “dish-count” sprang to something like twenty.

For me, the turkey was the important part. For her, it was the “spread.” There had to be lots of variety, such that you could never hope to eat more than a spoonful of everything without bloating.

I’ve since seen the light, myself. Turkeys are hard to cook correctly*, but a cornucopic feast is actually pretty simple if you plan ahead, and invite contributions from the invited guests.

So… what do YOU think?

–Howard
*NOTE: Don’t give me this “oh, but it’s so simple” crap… if you cook the whole bird at once, then by the time the dark meat is cooked to perfection, the white meat is dry and awful, unless you perform some serious thermodynamic voodoo. I have very high standards for the meat I eat, thus, “hard to cook correctly.”

I came downstairs to write about how much fun it was to make fried chicken, and ended up working instead.

That’s okay. The work needed to be done, and you guys can figure out how to make fried chicken on your own. Mostly I think this is a cool triumph of my easily-distracted nature. Instead of being distracted AWAY from work, I got distracted TOWARDS it.

more behind the cut

Okay, I played with RSS, and finally saw some benefit in it. It’s not intuitive by ANY stretch, but once you’ve figured out how to drop RSS feeds into your Bookmarks Toolbar folder in Firefox, you can tap those little icons on the toolbar and see what’s new on your favorite sites.

As has been mentioned before, this is best for blogs, or other sites whose updates are not scheduled like clockwork. I’m using it now for Cox and Forkum (a political cartoon that updates irregularly) and Websnark, a blog popular with the webtoonist set, which also updates irregularly. I tried putting my gmail account up there and it errors out. I think I have too much mail.

I’ve not played with aggregation at all yet.

Anyway, thanks for the help, folks. Specifically, thanks to strredwolf and matt_arnold, who actually posted a concise set of instructions I could follow. Honorable mention to p3rlm0nk and datapacrat for the FAQ link and the ForecastFox link, respectively.

I still need to look into Bloglines. That may prove useful when I’m on the road.

At any rate, the tentative verdict is “I will employ RSS for notification, not aggregation.” It’ll be a few weeks at least, as we’re still hammering on more important stuff on the site (transcripts in the archives for Google searchability, and Open Letter archives for a blog I can run ads in).

Thank you, and good night.

–Howard

Every couple of weeks somebody tells me I ought to create an RSS feed. I respond with “what would you use it for?” The reply is “well, it’d be cool to get Schlock in an aggregator.”

Fine. Show me an aggregator. I’m throwing down the gauntlet on you LJers because some of you talk about how cool RSS is. So far NOBODY has been able to provide me with a demonstration of the value of RSS. Until I can use it myself, I’m not going to go to the trouble of putting it in place. To date, RSS has been demonstrably worthless, because nobody has been able to demonstrate its worth.

Here’s your challenge: Post useful, clear instructions, such that I can follow them and observe the (to date wholly THEORETICAL) benefits of RSS for myself.

Go on, I dare you.

–Howard