get your own blog (onto ATHENSi.com)!

Want to say your piece to the Athens's Nation? Blog it. We'll subscribe to your rss feed and bingo, you've got a chance to make your case.

No idea how to get started? No idea about rss? This blog will try to explain all of the jargon, starting with "blog" and ending with "RSS." What I'm not going to tell you is what to say.

A lengthy definition of "blog" probably isn't necessary, so I'll keep it short. A blog is an online journal/diary/bully pulpit/&tc., which is relatively easy (and completely free) to set up. Check out blogger.com, host of this blog, if you have no idea of where to start. BTW, a few folks out there in cyberland actually make an honest living by blogging, but everything I read about that says it's a lot of hard work feeding the blog machine.

Once you've set up your account (say, on blogger.com), you need to identify your "rss feed," which allows your content to be "pushed" to ATHENSi.com... and anyone else's "feed reader." A feed reader, in essence, is a computer program that proactively looks for new content on sites to which it is "subscribed." In the case of a blogger.com blog, it has two types of RSS feeds to which feed readers can subscribe: a conventional RSS feed and an "Atom" feed. Since ATHENSi.com's system can't make heads or tails of Atom feeds, you need to know how to identify the "RSS" feed for your blog.

Since I can't ever remember the code ... and there's really no need to clutter up my already full brain with such code ... here's how I find the rss feed address for any of my new blogs.

1. copy and paste the blog address (i.e., the URL; in the case of this blog, the URL is: http://athensi.blogspot.com) into the form at http://feedburner.com.

2. feedburner.com will show you that there are two feeds from your blog (again, if it is hosted on blogger.com)... and Atom feed and an RSS feed:

Atom: http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
RSS: http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

You can see that they are very similar, with the alt=rss of the RSS feed address being the only difference.

3. Send me the address http://athensi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss at robertkstewart@hotmail.com and I'll subscribe to your feed on ATHENSi.com. Presto: your can now speak your mind to the rest of Athens...

NOTE: I recommend that you turn on the "comments" section of your blog, just like I have my comments section turned on. This allows for greater discourse, conversation, talkback, etc.

Please note: It may take a day or two (or three if I'm really busy or out of town) to get your blog added to ATHENSi.com. And once it is added, it sometimes takes an hour or two for your most recent blog post to show up on our site. Be patient, but if you don't see your posts showing up within a day or two, please email me to let me know there's a problem.

Please note: ATHENSi.com and its manager (me) are not responsible for the content of the blogs to which we subscribe. At the same time, I reserve the right to unsubscribe to any blog, for whatever reason I deem appropriate. I hope that never happens, but if it does, I'll try to explain why in this blog.