When it's depicted in a cool black and white photo of your home town, when it evokes nostalgic thoughts (read: memories of experiences you never had), when it causes you to learn cool historic facts, and of course when it's not happening to you.

The University Week (a weekly email newsletter that all UW staff/faculty/students get and which I hardly ever read) featured an interesting article about Seattle in the Great Depression of the 1930s. And you can read more about this because 80 students did a bunch of research. I love this stuff.

I have never even seen a shanty town in person, never experienced real financial hardship; but of course seeing an amazing panoramic picture of it with the Smith Tower in the background is awesome. And when I say awesome I of course mean awe inspiring and not, "Dood, that is so rad…"

My friend Jeff D had his bike stolen and was notified because someone found out about it on a blog post and gave him a ring. Nice. The Internet finally did some good. Except that the bike was not recovered and its still out there… So in hopes that this post will let someone else who has seen this bike Contact Jeff before they hock it on eBay, here is the info:

My house in NE Seattle was burglarized last night and my TT bike was stolen. Please keep an eye out for someone trying to unload a 55 cm black Cervelo P3 SL model year 2005. The most distinguishing feature is brand new a Quarq power meter on brand new rotor cranks. Luckily I had training wheels on it, Velomax I think, and not Zipp.

Thanks,

Jeff

(206) 335-3551

All blogs (at least as far as I know) have an RSS feed. Some authors choose not to make theirs public or to advertise it but I do. RSS seems like the easiest way to stay in touch with all the stuff you want to read, no way am I going to actually visit each site every day just to check and see if something new has been posted… that's ridiculous. Instead I just add the RSS feed for the blog to my favorite RSS reader and bingo, every time the author posts something I am sent a message. Simple, clean and burns way less calories.

A long time ago I discovered FeedBurner. How cool! So I immediately created an account, changed the RSS feed address for my blogs and forgot about it.

ASIDE – FeedBurner gives you statistics regarding your feed and you can also easily control and embellish your feed. All that neat-o gee wiz stuff that makes the Internet so cool in the first place.

Some time after I did this Google acquired FeedBurner. My blog (I use dasBlog) has this cool 'feature' where you can enter your FeedBurner username and it automatically changes the feed address. That was super slick until my FeedBurner username no longer worked. And no, I couldn't just plug in my Google account.

Not only that but I had signed up for this other nifty service I found called AddThis which added another layer of obscurity that I had to troubleshoot through when I finally realized that my RSS feed was not working.

ANOTHER ASIDE – AddThis lets people easily add and/or share your blog/web page with social networking sites and bookmarking sites and web based feed readers.

But now I'm all done and I learned a few things. Like:

• FeedBurner has some cool features since I last checked in! Stuff like SmartFeed which makes your feed compatible with any reader or device.
• I am now offering my feeds as email subscriptions for folks who just don't want to use an RSS reader.
• You can use MyBrand (another FeedBurner feature but only if you control your own DNS) to create a CNAME so that the URL for your feeds is something like feeds.yourdomain.com. How cool! Of course I did this.

Now that everything is all straightened out I can forget it all again. Here's hoping no more big changes happen to the free services that I use.