Well, first off, RSS is (as of October 13th, 2002) the most recent feature addition to Fury.com. More importantly, RSS is probably the optimal way to track all the sites you read (that have RSS feeds), seeing what new items have been posted since your last visit, and getting a quick look at the headlines and excerpts before jumping over to the site.

Don't get me wrong, I like people hitting the main page as often as possible. In fact, I regularly check my stats page to see just how many front page views there are on any given day. Keeping that number up is one of my motivations for making sure I don't go more than a day or two without posting.

Nevertheless, there are better ways to surf the web than jumping back to the same sites a couple (or couple dozen) times a day, just to see if anything new has been posted. This is where RSS comes in.

It doesn't have a catchy name. In fact, there's not even agreement on what 'RSS' stands for (but the same argument rages about 'PHP', not that it's hindered PHP's popularity. Most of the descriptions you'll find if you search for 'What is RSS' are at least two years old. Worse, they're written for people who might want to create an RSS feed, instead of those who might want to read one. Even worse, it talks about RSS in terms of XML, and I know there's no faster way to make a non-geek's (or even a lot of geeks') eyes glaze over than to even mention XML.

RSS is just a protocol, a format. Several really good programs have come out recently that will take the RSS pages for the sites you regularly visit and check them once every hour (or 30 minutes, or 4 hours, or whenever you say) and it'll tell you how many new articles have been posted. Even better, it'll give you a list of those articles' titles, and even give you a description of the article. This description is usually the first paragraph or so of the article. sometime's it's a bona-fide synopsis, and sometimes it doesn't exist at all. It all depends on how the site's creator set up the RSS feed.

But a picture's worth a thousand words, and my thousand's almost up. This is a screen shot form NetNewsWire Lite, easily the best RSS viewer currently out for OS X:

NetNewsWire Lite in action...

For the PC, there are a few good RSS readers, and some not so good ones. The most recent, and the one that seems to lead the bunch in terms of looks and functionality is NewzCrawler. Trillian, the AIM/Y!M/MSN/ICQ überclient, also supports RSS feeds, and I'm sure some people using RSS feeds now probably have some good insights into good Windows clients, so you might want to check the comments.

I hope this explains a bit about what RSS feeds are, but I understand if it doesn't. I expect that this page will probably make it to the first page of hits for the google search linked above, and if that happens, I'll feel obligatged to make it a little more holisitic, so please let me know if, after reading this post you 'get it' or are still backing away slowly...

Now, if you're sold on RSS, have downloaded a reader, and are good to go, then the icon links to the RSS feed, so you can right-click (option click for macfolk) to copy the url to the clipboard, and then paste it into the appropriate spot on your RSS reader program.

Give it a go... RSS has been around for over 3 years, but only in the last three or four months has it really been starting to pick up steam. Most of the news and community sites you might read (news.com, bbc, msnbc, slashdot, metafilter, kuro5hin, wired, plastic, etc.) already have RSS feeds, as do a lot of the blogs out there, since both Blogger 2.0 and Moveable Type 2.5 offer RSS feeds with the check of a checkbox, alongside a regular blog. If your favorite site doesn't have the XML button, ask them if they have an RSS feed. You might get a pleasant surprise. If not, they might decide to check that box (or write that code, for us loners who write our own blogging software), and join the coming wave of RSS-savvy folk.

Incidentally, this also spells the official end of Metacookie because, while it was a great idea, RSS feeds have already reached the tipping point, and actually provide a better solution to the problem of keeping current with a site. That admission alone should tell you just how viable I think it is.

My Wells Fargo Visa card expires this month, so it was no surprise to get a new one in the mail yesterday. What was surprising was that I'd been upgraded, and now warrant a Platinum Card.

Amusing to me is that my credit limit hasn't changed a cent, staying at a $3,000 max I haven't reached in the last two years. But now it's Platinum. It's pretty. This is now the card I'm proud to pull ot of my wallet when paying for dinner and trying to impress a date. After all, it's Platinum and it looks Platinum, and that says far more about my ability to be a family provider than if I opted for a translucent green card, which I can only guess is supposed to tacitly inform my dining partner that I'm looking to get married so that I can obtain citizenship.

Heck, my new credit card even has a Platinum Magnetic Stripe on the back, to impress others with my ability to induce ferromagnetism in otherwise nonferrous metals (not to mention making life difficult for people who can't tell where the stripe is, rendering near useless the semiotic drawing at ATMs showing which of the four orientations is the right one for swiping their card).

The funny part is that this is a credit card that was put on hold by Wells Fargo only last week because of suspicious activity. They sent me a nice letter letting me know that there was unusual activity on my card, and they did me the service of putting a hold on the card until I called them to go over the recent charges, item by item, to verify that they were all mine and authorized.

So I gave them a call and found out that the unusual activity was that, after six months of being overlooked in favor of my check card, I actually used it. I suppose to their fancy computers with their bayesian logic trees, that is unusual activity, and therefore suspicious enough to warrant shutting the card off, so that I don't do it again.

But now I have my fancy new Platinum card, lifting my spirits while padding my ass. I just hope all the honeys I try to impress with my ability to incur serious debt don't realize that every Wells Fargo customer is turning Platinum this year.

Shiny.

So for those of you who have been watching Firefly, I feel your withdrawl pains this week as it's preempted by Major League Baseball (though I can't mind TOO much, as the Giants look to be headed to the World Series). For those of you who haven't watched Firefly yet: you really, really should.

So, in lieu of watching tonight's (non-existant) Firefly, I recommend visiting the Official Firefly Website. Like verything Joss touches, this is pretty remarkable. It's far more than just a cast gallery, episode guide, and screensaver distribution point.

Of course it has all that stuff, but the high point is that they really let you in to the production process, showing the life-cycle of episodes, from initial script drafts to special effect comp quicktimes, to changelogs, and more.

The high point is a weblog maintained by Kelly, one of the production assistants (yes, a real person). The whole thing really has the buy-in from the cast and crew, and they're smart enough to realize that letting devotees behind the curtain is vital for the initial kick the show will need to make it through the difficult first season.

So go check it out, have fun, root for the Giants while muttering under your breath that two weeks is too long to go without a joss fix, then guiltily remember that Angel is on Sunday, and Buffy is on Tuesday, so there's always some joss around the corner...

So what I was going to say yesterday morning, when the website unexpectedly turn a turn for the serving-pages-not-so-much, was I was going to (got, it's almost a recursive sentence structure...) ask you all whether you still use/notice/care about the cell-o-scope widget on the left-hand-nav. I'm cleaning things up, consolidation and making room for some new stuff, and perhaps it's time for Cell-o-scope to go hasta la vista.

Anyone care? Any fond adieus?

You know your morning class is too early when you log on to your instant messaging clients and the only person online out of your 100 person buddy lists is another person in the classroom with you.

Yaaaawn.... Good morning world.

'Bait and Switch' got written up in a Danish news site, 'media:mac'!

I wish I read Danish...

Heya, how many of you use RSS feeds? If you do, please leave a comment here, and maybe a little bit on how you use them. I'm thinking about making an RSS feed for Fury, but I'd like a little more perspective on how people use them.

For those who don't know what RSS feeds are, or don't use them, you'll probably want to check the comments. They're really cool, and I bet a bunch of your fellow readers swear by them.

I had the weirdest three-minute dream last night. I was outside, on a playground or something, and I noticed a pimple on my arm, just in front of my shoulder. I started to squeeze it and immediately a powder-fresh two-inch long cherub popped out and just lay there on the playground, lethargically looking around. A friend of mine came over and I pointed it out to her, telling her, "that's so weird. that hasn't happened to me in like three months!" while casually inspecting the little two-inch cavern in my arm, like a belly-button with a golf ball-sized room behind it.

I should try to get more sleep. My body's trying to tell me something.

If any of you have never been to Exploding Dog, you really should. Readers email him captions and he draws the pictures. I love that site because content only comes every week or so, so I forget about it for months at a time, then visit and spend a half-hour rolling in laughter.

And I'm not the only one. The only thing better than Sam's juxtaposed cunning wit and crude drawing style is when people take that art and put it in the most (in)appropriate of places.

Yesterday I was walking down the hall from my office, surrounded by Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in the subfloors of Newell-Simon Hall, when I came across this office placard:

Usability study, anyone? (click to enlarge)

In related (well, loosly) news, the CMU HCII t-shirts are in! During orientation week we split into groups to design our class shirt that we would wear to conferences, and to show our HCI pride. My group's design won out, and now we've got the threads to show for it!

(Okay, very loosly. In Kevin's head it went "Ooh. I should get one of thise nifty exploding dog t-shirts. Oh I should tell them about the HCII t-shirts that came in! Yeah, I'll just talk about it here, since it followed from the train of thought. Oh, but not their train of thought. Oh well. It's my site. Yeah. I can just explain it all in 100 words or less at the end. Then it'll all make sense. Do you really think they care about it making sense? Do you think they're still reading? Oh, nevermind.")

Anyhow, funny sign, new t-shirts. End of line.

Damnit damnit damnit... this stupid software we're supposed to use for my computer music class is so buggy on the mac. not only do I frequently come across functions that just don't work on the mac side, but a couple hours ago it actually brought down my machine to the point where I had to install system software on another partition to get up and running again.

I hate this... I'd go talk to the instructor (class is right now and I have to go so I can at least catch some of it), but I think this is another one of the weeks he's away at a seminar. Fuck.

I'm just stressing.Part of me wants to ditch this class, but then I'd have to take seven classes next semester to graduate on time.

Okay, I'm stressing and venting, venting and stressing. Parental and familial types who may be reading this, don't worry, I'll take care of it in typical Kev fashion, but that doesn't stop me from having the stress, and using it as a fuel, a belly of burning coal to fire up a solution to this problem.

It's nobody's fault, and I'm not mad at anyone (except myself) but arghhh, it's so frustrating.

More later, I'm sure.