My mother-in-law, Lorrie sent out an email with the subject “Eat Your Heart Out” and all it had was a picture of this fish. Wow! I have yet to catch ANY fish on my fly rod. Now, she didn’t use a fly rod, but who cares?! Look at that fish! Needless to say, I am very impressed.
She called me yesterday to ask me a question, and I answered the phone, “Hello, Bass Pro Shop.” She liked that. And as it turns out, she is becoming quite the fisherman… er fisherwoman. Anyway, she is hooked! Sorry. No pun intended. No really though, she has been fishing with her dad, whom everyone calls Papa Joe, every chance she gets. I think that’s totally awesome. Not only is she taking up a new hobbie, but it gives father and daughter something to do to spend time together.
Can you imagine catching a fish this big? It is my goal to catch a fish like that one day on a fly rod. That would be incredible, and I think Captain Jeff would be proud. So, Papa Joe, I don’t know if you’ll ever read this. But if you do, your new grandson-in-law would LOVE to hit up the lake sometime!
Chad Kraus
One thing that has really intrigued me lately is RSS feeds. I knew it wouldn’t be that difficult to figure them out, but I just hadn’t taken the time to research it until last week. Aaron and I set out to learn the details of this increasingly popular aspect of the web.
What it comes down to is that they are very basic. If you have a website with multiple articles in a blog or multiple news stories, then you can easily create an RSS XML file. RSS files are made up of items. Each item must have three things: a title, a link and a description. The title is the name of the article. The link is the link to the full story located on your site. And the description is the text you want to show up from the article.
I discovered there are basically two ways to go about the description. You can be really nice and provide the entire article, even including images and links. Or you can simply provide the first few hundred characters as a sort of teaser. This way if someone who subscribes to your RSS feed is interested by the beginning of your newest article, they will click the link (Ah ha! Remember one of the three parts of an item is the link) that takes them to the full story. This is not a bad idea if you are trying to bring more traffic to your site. And who isn’t?
So while I feel privileged when the feeds I subscribe to provide the entire article, thus allowing me the ability to never leave Google Reader, I completely understand when a majority of them only provide a teaser.
If you are interested in learning more about the structure of an RSS file, just look at mine! It is located at http://www.mrandmrskraus.com/rss.xml
One thing worth noting. Not only does each item have a title, link and description, but these are also provided at the top of the RSS file in order to specify the main title, main website URL, and main description of your website.
Well, I will be excited if you all subscribe to my RSS feed now. The link to it is signified by the little orange icon on my main page. Happy reading!
Chad Kraus Aaron, web development