RSS feeds: Your nerd prayers are answered!
Good news, nerds! We now have RSS feeds for “Snide Remarks” columns, movie reviews, and this blog. Actually, we’ve had them for a while and just didn’t tell you. I’m not sure why it was a secret. I barely understand what RSS is, and I only gained that semi-understanding a few minutes ago, when I asked my nerd friend Randy to explain it to me.
Anyway, you can find the RSS feed under the “Snide Remarks” and “Movie Reviews” tabs at the top of the page. The blog RSS feed is linked on the right-hand side of the blog, above the calendar. Or, OK, fine, here they are: “Snide Remarks” RSS | Movie reviews RSS | Blog RSS.
RSS is a way to know when your favorite Web sites have been updated without wasting precious seconds going to them or precious brain cells remembering that they are always updated on certain days. RSS is so popular with the kids today that people have been e-mailing me demanding — DEMANDING! — that we institute it on EricDSnider.com. They say, “Eric, I am too lazy to remember that movie reviews are always posted on Fridays, ‘Snide Remarks’ on Mondays, and the blog pretty much every day! I demand an RSS feed to remind me! Please do additional work so that I can do less work!”
I’ll have you know that in my day, if you wanted to know whether a site had new content, you had to GO to the site and LOOK! And this was on DIAL-UP modems, too! You’d wait 60 seconds for a site to load, only to discover it hadn’t changed since the last time you visited it. And that was fine, because we were happy just to HAVE the Internet! You kids today, with your RSS feeds, and your podcasts, and your 100-hour TiVos, and your Lexuses that parallel park by themselves, and of course your rock ‘n’ roll! Bah! Applesauce! Fiddle-faddle and confundrum!
Anyway, you’ve got your RSS feeds. Weary me no more with your teasings!
November 3rd, 2006 at 9:15 pm
HA! I’ve been subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed for several months now. I AM ALPHA NERD
November 4th, 2006 at 1:14 am
TRUE Nerds had prayers answered long before. (But then, I know Randy, too, through his SS site, so Nerds of a feather?) I’ve been subscribed for about a month making me a moderate nerd. (To be a true nerd I would probably have to kiss another nerd in a tree while a guy watches…)
November 4th, 2006 at 7:09 am
Thanks Eric. RSS feeds make for time-efficient nerdery, which is the same as Franklin-Covey coolness, I think.
November 4th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
I don’t consider myself an alpha-nerd, but when I learned about RSS I subscribed to yours way back then.
November 5th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Of course, then I realized that the RSS feed I had hasn’t been working for a while.
November 6th, 2006 at 3:39 am
RSS is like an auto-subscription system, but better. It’s almost the same as having In The Dark or Snide Remarks subscribers, but instead of reminding (haranguing) your customers with mass emails (costing each one of them about .003% of Gmail space), you just send a little reminder to come check out the site, and that’s really all we need these days. It used to be the “two-click” rule for finding stuff you wanted. Well, now it’s the one-click rule, and you had better bring that link to me, or I’ll just sit their doing my job as usual.
And think of how RSS is saving the environment. A 1MB message sent to one million email addresses everday amounts to 7 million MB of space. Eventually, all of our harddrives will fill up and we’ll have to toss them out on the streets. But if you stored that 1MB somewhere, and then invited one million people to check it out, well then… efficient. See that? (Also, you’re not sending out a million typos per day — not that you ever have any of those, though.) (”Typos”? What’s a “typos?”)
I give us five years until computers no longer have any harddrives at all. Rather, all our data and software will be stored online, and everyone will always be connected all the time. And don’t you think it won’t happen. Whoever comes up with a new 12 step for net junkies now is going to be very, very rich.