Saturday 23rd September 2006

Felt like I was stuck in the working week for an age, as the days seemed to drift into each other. Glad the weekend has finally arrived, although now that I am here my plans seem to have fallen apart. Hold on a second, that does sound rather over dramatic. Due to circumstances beyond my control my Saturday evening out was taken away. I suppose I should start from the beginning. Pav was making a minor comeback on the DJ trail by having a four hour set over at the Roof in Maidenhead. I promised to come over and support him. After getting my haircut this morning, I came back home to settle in front of the computer and then watch Football Focus. During the show Pav text and asked if I was coming down, I confirmed that I was but a little over an hour later he replied saying the management had decided they wanted some commercial cheese and his slot had been cancelled. Great(!) Now I had to go back to my friend, whom I had turned down earlier in the week, checking if he was available. Yet it was short notice and I expected him to have planned something else. I was right. So, my Saturday out turned into a Saturday in but while many people would have been annoyed, I was quite content to spend time at home for a change. One person in particular whom would have been pleased is my bank manager.

Been seriously looking at creating an RSS feed for this weblog this afternoon. (In between the live football matches on Sky) It seems to be the de facto standard when you want your blog published or listed in any of the new blog directories, that you must have an RSS feed for them to capture all the important information. So off I went looking for a piece of software that would convert my entire blog and over four years of archives into an easily readable xml document. This is not an easy task, even though Pony Fish appeared to have the answer, when you view the final feed in a RSS reader, in my example, Sage which incorporates into FireFox, it was a mess. Instead of capturing the date and opening of postings, there was just a long list of web links, including the hidden technorati tags which I only started using almost exactly two years ago. Well rather than go on and continue to complain about it, you can judge for yourself. Hunting around the web, I found two pieces of software by the same company, Extralabs, both for RSS feeds. First we had RSS Wizard which actually is suited to the job of converting HTML but it was not very straightforward, even with wizard in the title. The basic idea is that you either use existing tags as starting and ending points for the RSS feed or create your own. I tried both methods but to no avail. I removed the software, whereby I was taken to a web site page requesting feedback on why I took the decision to uninstall the software. Forgive me for skipping this process. The next piece of software I found was called RSS Editor with a exact same installation routine but it was only later I discovered the developers were the same. On this occasion, you actually create the RSS feed manually by creating descriptions or rather I would put them as introductions to blog posting and link to the directly in each ‘topic’. This would not work on my blog as I do not use a single html page for a host and use no titles for entries unlike my sister site which uses Blogger. Close to giving up I asked my friend Hussein what he thought was the best option and his instant recommendation was Word Press, but this would not be an easy migration. Particularly when you consider the archives and the way my blog has developed over the years. For now, I think I will open this debate to my readers, the ones whom will actually use it. Firstly do I need an RSS feed? If so, any suggestions on which service to go for? If I do not need an RSS feed how else can I improve my web site?

Did not watch Attack Of The Clones this evening on Sky Movies and most likely will miss Revenge Of The Sith next weekend, but watching four out of the six Star Wars movies on Saturday night on television was great experience. Particularly the original trilogy, which I had not seen for several years, seven in fact. Will update the blog more tomorrow. Right now, I think I may go and get some sleep.

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