Explaining RSS in Plain English
It used to be that there were only a few blogs of interest to any one person, so it was easy to go and check those blogs once in a while to see if there was anything new to read. These days, however, there are so many blogs -- and many of them very good -- that it is almost impossible to keep up with all of them without some kind of assistance.
Most (all?) blogs offer a "feed" which will let you read a barebones version of the blog in a feed reader. Feed readers are extremely helpful because they bring all your blogs together in one place so (1) you don't have to remember all of the addresses and (2) you don't have to go and check all the time to see if anything new has been published.
If this sounds like something that might interest you, please have a look at the following video of The Common Craft Show for an explanation of RSS in plain English.
And now that you know all about RSS, maybe you will want to subscribe to TsukuBlog so you can be notified whenever we publish new content to the site.
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Mission Accomplished
I have successfully (I hope) moved all of the blog contents over to this new WordPress-powered interface. I also simplified the address of the blog from tsukublog.alientimes.org to blog.alientimes.org. I made links from the old site to the new, so none of your bookmarks will be broken, but it might be a good idea to update them anyway, just in case. And, if you do find any broken links, please let me know.
I also updated the site feed and email notification systems, which are hosted by FeedBurner. I think that I did everything properly, but we will have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out if the email notification is working properly.
There are still a few minor kinks to work out on the new site, but I will get to them in the next little while.
I think this new website is a lot easier to use than the hobbled version of Blogger that we had to work with because we were publishing to our own domain by ftp. The biggest difference that the users will notice is that we can now have a list of the categories used on the site, and we can also offer lists of posts by author, category, month, and title. I hope that our readers find it easier to look for articles of interest now.
If you have any comments about the new site, we would love to hear them!
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Moderating Comments
Tsukublog has been inundated with spam comments in the last couple of days, so I have set it up so all comments will be moderated before they are posted to the blog. This means that if you add a comment to an article, it may take a while for it to show up on the blog. It's unfortunate that this has to happen, but I guess that is the nature of the internet these days.
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Moving from Blogger to WordPress
Google updated Blogger a while ago, but many of the new features are not available to blogs that are published by ftp (like TsukuBlog). So, if we want to use all of the new Blogger features on this site, we either have to move the blog to BlogSpot or set up a "custom domain" that is still kind of controlled by Google.
I would rather be able to keep some control over the blog (i.e. I want to be able to decide how much space I am able to use for photos, etc.), so I have decided to try to move TsukuBlog to a WordPress-based system.
A Blogger-WordPress import tool was recently developed for the updated version of Blogger, so I think it is time to start working on the changeover. I am not sure how long it will take to move everything over, but I am going to start the process this weekend. If you notice the blog doing weird things, that is why.
I will post again when it looks like the job has been completed.
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Moving to Blogger Beta
TsukuBlog is run by Blogger and the Blogger software is currently undergoing some major upgrades. I have switched TsukuBlog to Blogger Beta (we were given the choice, but it was only a matter of time before we would be forced to switch) and that has caused some changes to the blog.
1. All members (contributors) of the blog must sign in with a Google account to post to the blog. (People who read the blog will not be affected.)
2. All of the posts can now be given labels. (See the bottom of this post for the label "tsukublog". If you click on it, you will be taken to all of the articles labelled with "tsukublog" on this site.)
3. The "feed" and "email service" was a bit strange yesterday because of the upgrade. If you subscribe to the feed or the email updates, you probably received a large number of posts yesterday. I assume that this was due to the upgrade and it shouldn't happen again. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I am still sorting out some of the details of the migration to Blogger Beta, but so far, everything seems to be in working order. If you notice anything strange, please let me know.
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