Many of you probably don’t know what a feed is, and explaining it is for another post. Let’s just say for now that this blog and likely any blog that you might have set up automatically come with a simple feed, which then allows people to subscribe to your blog and read your posts in a feed reader. Some sites have tried to simplify feeds, if you’ve ever seen “Add to My Yahoo” or “Add to My Google”, that’s the simplified ones for the non-geeks.

What kept me from posting yesterday was that I was working on a new feed, as I wanted to hopefully get that set up before anyone subscribed to the old one. Being a new blog, I doubt that I have subscribers; however, if there is actually anyone else out there that has subscribed to my feed besides my wife, please be aware that I have changed the feed. You are, of course, welcome to continue with the old one, but there will be more features if you sign up to the new one. The new feed will also let me see how many people are reading me that way, which will provide motivation to keep posting.

You can add the new feed by going to my blog and adding the feed as you always do, and then deleting the current feed you are using. Alternatively, my site now has some feed buttons and links that point to the new feed, or you can click on this link Click here to show detailed map in single view.Click here to show detailed map in single view. Click here to show detailed map in single view.Click here to show detailed map in single view.

How’s this for my wife’s next craft project? Need a place to hide your valuables when traveling, or even at home? Pretty sure that thieves already know to check whether that bottle of beer or can of Coke is just a false bottomed valuable stash? Here’s a great new valuable stash that you can be pretty sure thieves won’t suspect, and even if they did it’s doubtful they would want to test their suspicions.

You can click on the picture to go purchase a pair. I’m thinking, though, that this is a good time for that sewing machine I got my wife for Christmas 2005 to make an appearance. The effect will take on more realism if the undies match the others in my drawer, and will fool them even more if she uses a used pair that show signs of fraying and stretching. Just need to find something that will give it that look that will make sure no one will touch them, but won’t give it away by smelling like chocolate…

Technorati Tags: funny, vacation, underwear

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I haven’t posted in a few days as I’ve been busy trying to fix a few things with my blog. One of the issues is with regards to one of the biggest trackers of blogs, a site called Technorati. This is a site that indexes millions of blogs and lets you then search blogs for specific topics, watch for certain tags, see how blogs rank against each other, and much more. I use it to find certain things, such as to see what people are blogging about when they tag their blogs with Abbotsford.

So now that I am also doing a blog, I figured I should “claim” it on Technorati. This was easily done, but while I am now listed, Technorati will not add my posts to their index. It is as if I have a blog with no posts at all.

This is often due to bad HTML/XHTML, the text based language that this and every webpage are written. Search engines such as Technorati and Google send out spiders to read and index webpages; which is their geeky way to say they have their computers specifically search pages they want to add or update in their index. A spider can have problems with bad HTML, so I submitted this blog to an HTML validator. It found 139 errors in the page!

A lot of the errors were in HTML code that I cannot even access, code that Blogger puts into every page. Since thousands of Blogger sites are indexed by Technorati, that can’t be it.

Many of the other errors are in the template, which I can access, but I am using a Blogger supplied template that I have modified a bit and similar code is in all of their templates. Never-the-less, I changed templates to see if that would make a difference in case the specific template I choose was the issue, and that did not resolve the issue.

Next I went one by one through every post, widget and other add-ons I have on this page and saved them, wiped them blank, and tested by manually pinging Technorati to tell it I had updated the page. After each unsuccessful attempt, I then restored my saved copy of that component.

So all that work, and no results. A search of the web shows that many people of had this issue, and if they could not find errors in their HTML, then they simply had to hope that Technorati’s support would help them. Some report great service from support, others not. I have therefore emailed Technorati support and asked for their help, but it can take a week or two just for them to first respond. I will post the results of my request for help.

My other hope is that the web community can help me faster than Technorati. I will therefore submit this post to a number of sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us and see how can solve it first. If you know what’s wrong and how to fix it, please let me know through the comments, and also let me know how you got here so I know which community to credit.

Technorati Tags: Technorati, validation, Blogger, Digg, Del.icio.us

Update: My promised update can be found here, though it is of limited use to others in the same situation.

This video is from King5 TV in Seattle, showing their neighbours to the south in Portland having a bit of trouble with the weather we’ve had on this coast this winter. While we aren’t used to much snow or below freezing weather, I’m not sure what made each person in this video figure they could do what no one before them could manage!

Technorati Tags: video, ice, accidents, cars, crazy