This one is for the technically-minded… Even those of you who frequent this site might have missed the tweaks I finally got around to dealing with on Tuesday. The biggest thing is that the home page to this site is now http://www.futilityinfielder.com/home.php to enable my RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to display snippets of my most recent blog entries. There’s a redirect script for those who simply type “www.futilityinfielder.com” but if you’re intent on coming through the front door, it wouldn’t hurt to update your bookmarks.

The short version fo all of this mayhem is that the third-party solution I had in place to display my RSS feed decided to go “pro”. Lacking the will to pay $10/month for what I once got for free, I set about banging my head against the wall for a few weeks until I came across an excellent tutorial which walked me through almost exactly what I needed to do, using a piece of software called Magpie. See, there are legions of ways to generate an RSS or XML feed (most blogs have them as built-in options) but precious few means of parsing said feeds — that is, bringing them into other HTML pages converted into readable English rather than coded gobbledygook. I have to thank Ashley Bennett for his patience and guidance with the aforementioned tutorial.

The upshot is that now when you visit my home page, you should be able to see the most recent blog entries at a glance, without any lagtime. Elsewhere on the site, I renamed the dorkiest department to “Field Trips” and made a few other tweaks here and there. Don’t sweat it if you don’t notice…