Column - New Media Modeler

I am really enjoying this new ZINE! It was a great dissapointment that Leo has had to postpone his work on reality reuduced. I really enjoyed his show, hopefully he can come up with a way to continue his excellent work. Hint Hint maybea as a correspondent for MRH, with a quarterly episode in the ZINE. Certanily better for us than no Reality Reduced at all. Anyway thanks for the great ZINE and thank you Leo for your super program.

This is news I can use. I didn't know that podcasts related to Model railroading were available. Glad to find out.

Guys, thanks for the comments on my article in the first issue of MRH.  I totally forgot about the article feedback buttons.  Joe, is there a way for me to be notified via email when a new comment is posted for one of my articles?

Thanks
-=Ryan

Ryan:

You being a new media guy - you into RSS feeds? If you've used them then you know the RSS reader will deliver to you new content when ever it's posted - so it's like subscribing to an email list only better.

Seems like setting up RSS feeds for these comment pages would be good - then it becomes very easy to get notified whenever new content shows up.

Joe,

Please pardon my ignorance but what is an RSS feed and what does one need for it?

Irv

Irv,

RSS is a method of making available headlines/changes on websites in such a fashion that an RSS reader (and it's pretty amazing how many programs are RSS enabled now) can periodically retrieve that information.

If you are using Firefox for your web browser and you go to a site that has RSS available, you'll see an orange square with semi-circular lines radiating from the lower left to upper right hand corner up in the address bar. Click on that and you'll have the opportunity to save it as a "Live Bookmark" - a bookmark that updates itself with what is currently available on that website, per the RSS feed.

Most blogs have them enabled and it's a really quick way to check if the blogs you read have had any updates recently.

That's the simpl-ish explanation - this is where you'll find the full one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.^[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",^[3] or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, mobile device or any computerized Internet-connected device.

Irv:

In plain english, RSS is to the web as Netflix is to video.

In the old days, you would go to the video store to find videos to watch. Today with Netflix, they send the videos you're interested in to your door.

In the old days of the web, you visit web sites, blogs, etc to find new content. With RSS, you subscribe to the web pages of interest and the new content gets delivered to you! Much nicer!

Here's a great Youtube video that describes all this in simple terms:

RSS is one of the most poorly understood but most powerful features of the web. It's also a great timesaver! We have some RSS feeds on this site, but I need to add more - especially for the magazine article feedback. Right now this content is not available as it's own feed, so I need to do a bit of work to add an RSS feed for it.