Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Feed issues resolved

Well, I don’t know what Blogger did, but my last post on the Google news feeds had some weird tags embedded into the html code so my feed was really messed up. I don’t know if it was something I did but I noticed the other day on a forum where I am an admin that my feedburner animator was not working. So I did some research and noticed that my feed was formatted weird but didn’t know why. After a post on the feedburner support forums, I was directed to the problem using Feed Validator.
You put your feed address into this site and it looks through it and finds formatting issues. After I looked at it, I was able to go into blogger and edit the html and fix the issue. As soon as I edited the post and pinged feedburner, I refreshed my post on the support forum where my animator was also and it started working.
So thanks to the Feedburner support folks for the help and the link.

dj

ps, I was looking at my feeds in bloglines and noticed about three of you using the atom feeds. Could you switch to the feedburner one? Please :)

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Creating news feeds from Google News


This may be old news but I found a way to create your own specific RSS news feeds using Google news. After going to Google News, create your search. You can go to the advanced search and limit which sites are searched and which ones are left out. For an example, I wanted to search for any news on the Eastern Kentucky University Colonels, but I didn’t want to search the Western Kentucky Athletic site. That way if they post a story on how a player did against us, it won’t show up in my feed.

You can have the search leave out a site by putting a –site:sitename at the end. Here is my search term for the EKU search

"eastern kentucky = colonels -site:wkusports.com

After you run the search and it brings in what you want, on the left side of the page you will see the RSS link. Click it and it will take you to a XML page with the feed address in it. Just copy and past that into Bloglines or what ever you use for RSS and you have your feed.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Holiday week

Ok. It’s been a busy month and it’s not even half way over. Gee wiz, I thought summer was a time to relax. It’s not really been bad, just the holiday was busy. Brian’s son Jake had his first birthday on the Sunday before his real birthday on July 4th. It was a good time. My parents and my aunt came up on Saturday and we cooked out at our house for dinner. The boys were wired after that and about never went to sleep. The party was over at my brother’s in-laws house and Jake didn’t disappoint with the cake. He dug in after picking at it for a bit and then smeared the cake all over his face. The bottom of his face was covered in blue icing. It was great.
Being a contractor, I had to take Monday off as well as Tuesday since the place I work at was closed on Monday. No pay, but a day off. Oh well. I got to sleep in that day so that helped. Nothing really to do but to get ready for fireworks on Tuesday.
Some of the guys in my men’s group put on their own fireworks show. They invite a lot of people from our groups and other groups over for a big cookout and just sit around and fellowship until the evening when the show begins. We were worried that the twins would freak out over the fireworks. Zach did a little bit but fell asleep shortly after they started. We took the twins inside close to the end and I came back out to watch the end. Misty came back out with Gabe and she told me later that he seen some of the fireworks go off and jumped up on the couch and said “sparkles” while pointing at the fireworks. So, Misty brought him back out to watch the rest of the show. On the way home, Gabe saw all kinds of fireworks out the van windows and all we heard on the way home was “sparkles” It was good to see him react good to the fireworks.
Also, I have a post on dadbloggers on Wednesday. I will post the link to it once it’s up on the site.