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	I Love Technology, I Hate Technology   (November 18, 2005) At the suggestion of a kind reader, I recently joined Technorati and added an RSS feed to this site. My last (non-editor) boss used to say, "I love technology" when something worked right, and "I hate technology" when the same software/hardware/function failed. Considering our little back office interfaced satellite feeds, Linux boxes running hand-coded scripts, a bunch of Windows machines and a Mac for desktop publishing, there were ample opportunities for both expressions. Having gotten the RSS feed to work, I'm in the "I love technology" camp--at least for now. To learn a bit about RSS and Atom, and aggregators/readers, here is a quick intro. Here's how to add this site to a news aggregator. Go to "add a feed" and paste in this URL: https://www.oftwominds.com/feed2.xml   It's that easy. After checking out some of the dozens of options in news aggregators, I am trying NewsGator, which is a browser-based tool ( i.e. no downloading required, it works within your browser) and AmphetaDesk, a stand-alone (i.e. executable you have to download). I am also liking Feed Reader. All are free. So what is a news aggregator? It's basically a list of "favorites" or "bookmarks" with some XML-powered features which allow you to quickly skim the new content (headlines) of a bunch of sites and blogs. Among all the tutorials I read about RSS, I would recommend these two by Danny Sullivan and Stephen Downes With a million feeds being added a month--at least that's the number being bandied about--there certainly is a lot of content to choose from. Technorati is a searchable database of blogs; bloggers join for free, and anyone can go there to search for blogs on specific topics. Check it out, it's fun. Last but not least, I added an excellent site search tool. After looking into a number of options, I went with Crawl-It , a German site-search company which offers what I consider a distinct technological advantage: it "crawls" your site and assembles a complete site map/index, which it then references for searches. If your site has hundreds of pages as this one does, that's a nice feature. * * * copyright © 2005 Charles Hugh Smith. All rights reserved in all media. I would be honored if you linked this wEssay to your site, or printed a copy for your own use. * * *
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