The PrebleNY.com web site was revamped in April of 2003. Now in our 5th year!

 
NEW STUFF

I added an RSS newsfeed. The link is on the left. What is this? Put simply, if you read the news from a large number of sites that offer RSS then you can use one program to grab all the headlines automatically from all the sites without going to the sites themselves. On my Mac, using OSX, I downloaded the free NetNewsWire Lite (below) and "subscribed" to my site. I did that by first "right clicking" on the link to the left and "copied the link". I then ran NetNewsWire and clicked on the "subscribe" button and pasted in the link (URL) of my site. That's it. It went to my site and got the most recent 15 entries and showed me the headlines. I can then click on the one I'm interested in and it will show me the text. It's really quite cool.

Special pieces of software called News Aggregators can read RSS feeds, examples are FeedDemon (Windows), NewsMonster and amphetaDesk (cross-platform), and NetNewsWire (for the Lite and free version scroll down to the bottom of their page.) and Shrook (Mac OS X).



What is RSS?

Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for a site. Originated by UserLand in 1997 and subsequently used by Netscape to fill channels for Netcenter, RSS has evolved into a popular means of sharing content between sites (including the BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet, and more).
posted by Frank at 1:25 AM

 
Atomz Search

As you can see I've added a search function. The one I chose, linked above, is much nicer than the one I used before and was very easy to setup.

After I set up the account with Atomz they crawled the site and produced this report:

4/14/03 1 PM

The last index of your web site index completed 2 minutes ago. It took 3 minutes to crawl 361 pages and index 361 pages containing 435229 words for a total of 3930815 bytes. 23681 word endings, 0 synonyms, 21402 sound-alike words, and 15 excluded words were included in the index.

And now I know I have 361 web pages, a fact I didn't know. I thought it was much less than that. Let's see... If it took me a several hours to create each page and there are 361... Makes me tired just thinking about that.

Atomz also offers an advanced search. Not knowing just where to put it I stuck it here for now. Preble NY Advanced SearchTemporary Home Try it out and let me know how it works.
posted by Frank at 1:08 AM

 
WELCOME to the NEW PrebleNY.com web site!

As you can see I've made a lot of changes and I'm just getting started. I won't make any rash promises but you can expect to see more new things in the days/weeks to come.

What's new?
I'm now using blogs, short for weblog technology to maintain and update these pages. To you this means that there will be more frequent and plentiful postings. For me it means a great savings in time to make those posts and I can make them from anywhere. This may not mean much to you but it makes my life a lot easier. Posting's that took 15 minutes the old way will now take just a click of the mouse. Even easier then sending an email. I have to admit I've gotten lazy over the last six months updating the reports of meetings and late breaking news. Now because it is so easy for me I will be posting much more often, perhaps several times a day.

Currently there are three blogs on the site.

"Preble New" is for news about Preble exclusively. Town Board meeting reports and general news.

"About the Preble NY web site" has details about the site and news of changes to the site.

"Not Safe For Democrats" is a place for me to express my conservative republican views. As the name implies, democrats and liberals should avoid this page. It gives me a place to vent and to provide links and information to others of like thinking. I've wanted to do this for over a year.

"Good Old Daze" is the old PrebleNY.com site. Pay heed to the notice on the front page. By the way it is better to use the search from one of the new pages rather than the old one on the old pages.

The other links are outside this site and all of them open in a new window.

Before you ask what the word "Archives" means on the left of the other two blogs... They will automatically archive every 31 days. Except for this one. When that happens the lists of archives will appear under that heading. At least that's what I think and hope will happen. I'll be waiting to see myself.

Using this technology means that I can add a new blog at will. If something comes up such as another truck stop I can create a blog for that in under an hour. I am really excited about the ease and flexibility this affords us.

Technology behind the site.

I've been working on this change for several weeks, mostly learning about it and deciding how to set up what I need. There are several blog technologies available. I decided on blogger.com because of it's ease of use and because Google just bought it out. I love Google and I expect great things to come to blogger because of that. Blogs are very popular; there are thousands of them covering every aspect of web life. Blogs are very easy to set up. Mine is a bit more complicated because of the customization I'm doing. Besides quick and simple posting to the site I like another aspect and that is the use of templates. I could have used templates and should have in the old site but I just never got around to doing it. The result was more work for me in the long run. A template, in blogger terms is similar to a letterhead. All of the information on the page except for the posts themselves is in the template. In my case all three blogs use the same template although they don't have too. This means that if I want to make a change to the overall look of the site or add links to all the pages all I have to do is edit the template! I'm starting off with a simple template just to reduce problems but I plan to tinker with it until I get it the way I like. You'll see the changes as I make them.
posted by Frank at 11:07 PM