I’ve added some new feeds and modified existing feeds, so please check out the list below to make sure that you’re subscribed to exactly the right feeds for you.

Note that I’ve removed the annoying comment count from the RSS feeds, so if you want to be notified of new comments, you’ll either have to subscribe to the fulltext + comments feed, or the comments only feed.

Also note that the previous link to the comments only feed from the bottom of the page was incorrect, so if you had previously tried to subscribe to it using that link, give it another try.

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RSS 2.0: Blog Entry Excerpts
RSS 2.0: Blog Entry Fulltext
RSS 2.0: Blog Entry Fulltext + Comments
RSS 2.0: Blog Comments Only
Atom: Blog Entries Fulltext
RSS 2.0: Clip Blog

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Enjoy, and please let me know if you find any problems with the feeds!

P.S. This list can also be found at the bottom of all of our pages, as well as in the header of each document (so it should show up, for example, in Firefox’s feed detector).

Currently, we offer an RSS feed with excerpts from our ***blog entries|http://prwdot.org/blog.xml***, and an RSS feed with the ***most recent comments|http://prwdot.org/comments.xml*** for all entries on the blog. Would anyone be interested in a full-text RSS feed for our blog, which would include both the complete text of blog entries *and* the complete text of the comments on each entry?

Feeds can be used to read new items from blogs and news sites in one central application, such as a web-based aggregator like ***Bloglines|http://www.bloglines.com/***, or a desktop aggregator like ***NetNewsWire|http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/***.

I hope you’re all enjoying the banners here at World Wide Wood. We currently have 31 unique photographic banner images, and one of them is selected at random each time you load a page on our site. Collect ’em all!

Allow me to direct your attention to a few new features I’ve added to the site. If you’re reading this via RSS, you won’t see any of these changes, so be sure to visit prwdot.org to see them.

* We have added some new names to the list of Friends on the left. Be sure to check them all out – they represent people whose blogs we regularly read, or at least people we keep in touch with on a regular basis (Corey, for example, doesn’t even have a blog).

* Also at the footer of each entry is an ‘Email This Entry’ link. This will bring up a form that allows you to send a link to that entry to the email address of your choice. Use this if you see an entry you would like to send to a friend, or if you would like to send yourself a note to read it when you get home. This isn’t all that new, but nonetheless it appears to be underutilized.

* There is now a ‘Contact Us’ page, that pulls together all of the information on how to get in touch with us. Find it on the left hand side of our page under ‘Our Site’. It includes a link to a fun, user-friendly email form. 🙂

* Finally, if you haven’t figured this out already, the photographic banner at the top of our site changes each time you load the page. There are over 20 different banners to be seen, and all you have to do to see them is click around on our site! (Simply clicking on the banner over and over will work fine, but we’d rather you click around on other pages too!)

Enjoy, and as always, feel free to share any comments or suggestions!

If you’re reading this, it means that the upgrade to Movable Type 3.121 was a success! I discovered that if I signed up for the free Six Apart Professional Network, I could ge a full-fledged five-user commercial license at no charge! This works great for our setup, and being a member of the Professional Network will be very helpful with my work on this site. I’ll have access to online support, documentation, and a library of resources. I might even end up writing some cool software to enhance Movable Type – namely plugins. Plugins are typically written in Perl, which is my “native” programming language, and though I haven’t worked on any yet, I’ve looked over the documentation and it seems pretty easy! All in all, this upgrade should make life easier and more productive for the bloggers hosted at prwdot.org.

Blog comment spamming usually involves a malicious party writing a computer program that seeks out blogs, finds their comment scripts, and submits tons of advertisements into them. Read on if you’re interested in the techniques I’m using to fight comment spam.
Continue reading →

There are 122 different blogs and news feeds that I watch on a daily basis through Bloglines, and often some of the stories or links are noteworthy, but not noteworthy enough to warrant a post on our main blog. Many people use a system of a “linkblog” or “asides”, which is really no more than a different category that doesn’t get included with the main blog listing. I could do this easily enough, but Bloglines has its own blogging feature built in. When I’m reading an entry within Bloglines, I just click on the “Clip/Blog This” link, fill in a quick thought, and the entry is automatically added to my Bloglines blog.

In order for you readers to keep track of my linkblog, you can head over to the clipblog page I’ve created. Or, if you’re the RSS type, you can syndicate it.

Enjoy, and be sure to keep checking up on it – there will most likely be a lot of stuff there that never makes it on to this blog.

Welcome one and all to our new Website! We were feeling a need for something new. That something turned out to be simple, crisp, and uncluttered look.

You’ll notice that we have lost the ads, the large link buttons, extra boxes and colors. By doing away with those extras we’ve really cleaned up the format. All your favorite links are still here, though. We’ve gone with the uber popular “alphabetical links” style for all our friends and then kinda grouped everything else by topic. Enjoy getting used to the location of your most used links.

The Gallery link is still here. Just click on the little rectangular picture!

I hope that you like the change. We always enjoy feedback so lay it on us!

**Special note to those who are reading via RSS** Make sure you stop by and check out the new look. Your RSS feed won’t reflect the great new changes!

If you’re viewing our website, you might notice that it has been, well, beheaded. Our photo on the left has been chopped off. This is my fault, and it is an accidental side-effect of the website redesign that Becky and I are working on right now. I usually make separate copies of our site code to work on so that we can see the new design without messing up the old design. Well, I accidentally edited one of the files for our old design instead of the corresponding file for the new design, and saved the file before I realized what I had done. I could easily have my host restore the old version of our page from a backup, but I’d rather just get the redesign done soon. At which point we won’t be needing that photo anymore. I hope you’re all okay with that for the next few days. 🙂

Keep your eyes peeled for our new look, coming soon to a web browser near you!

One of the most popular features on our site, besides our blog, is the photo gallery:

Our gallery contains 4,894 images in 8 main albums that are publicly accessible, with an additional 1,142 images in two albums that are restricted to certain groups of registered users. That’s a total of 6,036 images!

Our images cover a time span from the fall of 2001 to the present day. There are photographs related to any number of subjects, from family gatherings to parties, holidays to sporting events, travel overseas to travel down the street. You can journey from San Francisco to Spain, fly from Massachusetts to Kentucky, enjoy a sunset on Cape Cod, or a sunrise in Manchester-by-the-Sea.

Currently, the bulk of our images are organized into a ‘Year-by-Year’ album, which is then broken down by year, and within each year the photo albums are in reverse-chronological order. My question for all of our site viewers is, do you find the organization of our photo gallery useful, and if not, what changes would you suggest to make it easier to use? For Becky and I, the year-by-year organization works well since we know generally what year certain events occurred. But for folks who don’t know us as well, I’m not sure that is the best way to browse. I feel that our gallery has a lot to offer even for people who may not know us well, and so I’d like it to be as useful as possible.

Please take a look at our gallery, and then let us know by way of a blog comment what you think about the way it’s organized, the content of the gallery, or any other feedback that may be useful. Thanks!