How To Use This Thing

Radio liveblog of the Minnesota game forthcoming... which should be interesting.

So. Pardon something that may be a "duh" statement, but this is a blog. The word blog is like obscenity: no one really knows what it is, but you know one when you see one. The simplest and most complete definition of a blog is "a really easy way to publish a website in reverse chronological order," but there are a lot of bits that are often-but-not-always components of said website that make absorbing the bit-heroin more convenient. Since I'm stuck on Blogger for a little while longer, there are only a couple relevant bits of knowledge. I hope to switch to Wordpress soon, at which time all knowledge will be beamed directly into your brain. Anyway, the bits:

Linking to MGoBlog from elsewhere is always much appreciated. The more people who join the dar al-blog the better. However, an annoying thing about linking to blogs is that the front page is always changing. By the time someone gets around to clicking on the link provided, something almost but not quite entirely different may be featured as the last post. This leads to consternation and, in extreme cases, firebombs hurled at my apartment. Not cool.

The solution is in the magic little panel at the bottom of each post. You will see a line like so:

Permalink posted by Brian @ 10:40 AM X Comments | X Trackbacks

The "Permalink" contains the URL that uniquely identifies the post you want to link to. Using permalinks makes you a message board superstar. Rock on.

Weaning yourself from clicking your bookmark every twenty seconds can be accomplished in many different ways that are all the same way at heart: RSS. In a nutshell, RSS packages up the posts I write in a standard format that RSS readers can interpret. This allows you to, say, track the feeds of two hundred different blogs in one convenient place, like so:

That's a screenshot from Bloglines, which is a popular reader. In practice, using an RSS reader for one website is not much of a time-saver, but when you track a ton of sites it's indispensable.

Also of note: you can subscribe to the blog's comments here (there is also a link under "Site Feed" on the sidebar. The result is somewhat lacking -- comments appear in order of posting with no context -- but at least you know what conversations are ongoing.