Hey fellow Frogponders,

I have a new toy you might be interested in testing. Details after the fold.

Fair warning: If you have no experience with RSS, you may not be interested. On the other hand, if you use RSS at all, or tend to read Booman Tribune a lot, or would like a (possibly) more convenient way of keeping up with BT, this just could be for you.

– – – – (fold) – – – – (fold) – – – – (fold) – – – – (fold) – – – –
First, a brief introduction for those of you who don’t know: RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s basically just a way of quickly describing the contents of a website in a computer-friendly way. (It’s also the basis for podcasting, which I may take up in a future diary. But I digress.) You use a program called an “aggregator” to read RSS. Yahoo has one built in that you can use with your My Yahoo page, if you have one. Firefox has the Sage extension that integrates an aggregator into the browser. There are standalone aggregators for Windows, Linux and Mac; if you know of a good one, feel free to suggest it below.

If you go down to the bottom right-hand corner of most BooTrib pages, you’ll see a little orange-and-white “RSS” icon. Don’t click it right now — you’ll lose your place! That shows that Booman Tribune has an RSS “feed.” The BooTrib RSS feed, however, only covers the front-page stories.

Enter Omir’s handy-dandy new diaries feed. It covers the 60 most recent diaries, and marks the recommended ones. In Sage, for instance, when you have the BooTrib Diary feed loaded you can click on a diary in the left-side panel and it will open up automatically, or you can hover your mouse over the name of the diary and see the above-the-fold copy. This might give you an idea of whether the diary will be worth your attention.

To use the feed, point your aggregator to the following URL:

http://www.moosegrins.com/bootrib/bootrib.rss

There are some things the RSS feed will not do. It won’t tell you whether a recommended diary is regular-recommended or world-recommended. It can’t track the fact that a diary was on the recommended list, but is not longer. It won’t make your coffee, it won’t pick up your husband’s dirty socks when he leaves them laying around in the middle of the living room floor, and worst of all, it might break in ways that I haven’t anticipated. That’s why I’m looking for testers. Feel free to pound on the feed and tell me where I’ve gone wrong (or right).

Above all, share and enjoy.