Room 65 & RSS

Well, this week has been somewhat busy, principally due to the aforementioned Room 65. Which is a café, held at Carrubbers Christian Centre on the Royal Mile for the duration of the festival. Runs from 8-11pm Monday to Saturday, should you wish to drop in. Bit more information here. There is a fair bit of live music involved, and although I don’t normally attend Carrubbers myself, they roped me in to play piano with the main band. I must say it was very gracious of them to involve me, and I’ve had a lot of fun, despite having strong feelings at times that I am single-handedly destroying the musical integrity of the ensemble…

Now, the bright ones amongst you who earlier spotted that I am not actually in Australia yet despite my blog purporting to be purely about that trip, will probably have observed that the festival hasn’t actually started yet. Interestingly, I am only playing until Saturday night, after which one of the regular Carrubbers pianists will take over. Which makes me wonder idly if I am actually part of an elaborate warm-up routine for the main café starting next week… however I’m sure that’s my paranoia going into overdrive… 😉

So, onto RSS… which might well be of interest to those of you who are bored enought to read this blog from time to time. Basically, RSS allows you to monitor when a site (in this case, this one) has been updated, without actually visiting it and risking the crushing disappointment that would ensue if there were no new posts to read. This is an infinitely useful feature, especially as, unlike some of my friends, my life isn’t interesting enough for me to post things up daily, and so the aforementioned crushing disappointment could be experienced regularly by the particularly bored amongst you. So, at this point, I should tell you how it works, except that I really have no idea. This is the kind of thing that I should have researched before actually starting to type all of this. I use a browser called Safari, which shows an “RSS” symbol in the address bar whenever a site is RSS-enabled, or whatever you call it. When you click on this, it takes you to a page which shows a couple of lines from each post. If you bookmark this summary-type page then when the site has been updated since your last visit it puts a “1” in brackets after the name of the bookmark, or however number of updates there have been.

Right, so that’s all great, but most of you don’t use Safari, because you’re under the influence of the Evil Empire. Some of you will probably use Firefox… Firefox has a little orange symbol which looks a little like a radio broadcast on sites that support RSS. Clicking that adds the site to your bookmark menubar, and clicking that bookmark then provides a drop-down menu of all the posts on that blog. However, for those of you using Int***** Exp***** I have absolutely no idea how RSS works. Perhaps one of my more clued-up geeky friends, like the honorary Mac Genius Alyn Jones, will be able to shed some light on it. And provide a more concise explanation of how to use it to your benefit. In fact, I was sure that he explained it all in a post on his own blog (www.musthavemore.com) some time ago, but unfortunately there are 3 years’ worth of posts on there and I couldn’t find it…

For those of you who have persevered in scrolling down and reading all this, well done. I feel embarrassed. In case you thought you were getting a whole post without cricket getting a mention… I finally return to cricketing “action” this Saturday, weather-permitting. Holy Cross 2nds take on Murrayfield Dafs 2nds, and we really have to win. Otherwise relegation is staring us in the face… Come on the Cross!

3 thoughts on “Room 65 & RSS”

  1. Yeah, Internet Explorer is kinda in the dark ages without RSS and tabbed browsing (Outlook doesn’t even support newsgroups natively). Anyhow, Internet Explorer 7 is coming out in line with the new version of Windows (Vista) either later on this year or early next year – it’s in Beta just now and it supports RSS and tabbed browsing. Word on the grapevine is that it is better than Firefox (don’t shoot me – I haven’t used internet explorer for years). Problem is that the Beta is REALLY buggy.

    Just to add more support to Microsoft…there must be some reason everyone uses it – Vista is going to be great!

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