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Snap, crunch, break

Anyone reading this via RSS feeds probably noticed I destroyed that functionality today. My bad on that. I was renaming folders under the blog settings and I thought that I could cover my tracks with redirects for backward compatibility, meaning old links–such as http://www.conorschaefer.com/Blog/index.php/feed/–would remain operational. But nay.

Coming to the homepage of the blog will always work fine, and display the site regardless of the state of the various accoutrements like RSS functionality. That said, I’ll try to give a bit of warning or at least test beforehand if (or when, I should say) I do anything like this in the future.

For those of you not viewing this blog using RSS, please look into it! (Judging by the number of hits on my RSS feed versus the number coming directly to the homepage, it appears most people are using a bookmark.) RSS is a much more convenient for browsing frequently updated sites like blogs. Look up in the address bar of this site, and you should see this icon:

Anytime you see that, the site you’re looking at has an RSS feed. You can then use that button to set a “Live Bookmark,” which dynamically updates itself to show the latest headlines (blog entries) each time you click on it.

Also, if you have a lot of feeds, please check out Netvibes. It is far and away the best feed manager I’ve ever used, as it allows you to view the entire site to which the feed belongs, rather than just the entry text, as some readers (Google’s, for instance) restrict you to looking at.

The second great choice in my mind would be Thunderbird, which I think everyone should be using for e-mail anyway. But its RSS support is also very strong.