To My RSS Subscribers...

Note: If you don't know what RSS is, it's short for "Really Simple Syndication".  It's a mechanism for having one's blog posts delivered to your inbox, Google Reader or other web syndication tool.  This keeps you from having to visit a webpage every few days.  My new posts can be handed to you on a silver platter!  I RSS-subscribe to about 20 blogs this way and it's great!

I want to apologize to my RSS subscribers in case you had every one of my 500+ blog posts pushed to you over the past 2 weeks as I'd been updating the "labels" on each post.  On 99% of the posts, there were no changes to the post itself, I just added a label or two, that's all.  On those that might have had edits, they were probably to clean out some dead links or freshen up some pictures.

Perhaps you're wondering "What is a 'label'?"  Well, at the bottom of this blog post (right under the time stamp) you'll see one: "blogging".  If you click on that link for "blogging", you'll find all the blog posts that I've labeled as such.

I didn't do this before and recently I've started to regret it.  I have so many smart-ass and punny blog titles that don't help sum up the topic of what I'm writing about.  I was looking for a blog post about Howie's recent injury and the title is "Oops He Did It Again".  (Not to be confused with "Oops I Did It Again" which was about Jim Cantore and The Weather Channel).  That title didn't help me find the post very well, but now that it's labeled "Howie", it'll come up when I do a search.

This will also help me when I'm searching for birds I've blogged about, or flowers, or our travels.

It'll help you too if you have a reason to refer to my blog.  If you only want to subscribe to my blog for certain labels (if you're only interested in my cooking or my moving antics), you can follow these directions.

With the labeling I'm able to bring a couple new features.

I installed a new widget called LinkWithin, which brings you relevant blog posts at the end of each of post.  The labels help the web crawler tool find the relevant posts more easily.

Another feature on the right hand side is the "Label Cloud".  You might have to scroll down a little to see it.  The most relevant labels are sized by how many of each post there is.  I like how it gives an idea of what topics I cover the most.  Click any one of those links and you'll be presented all blog posts with that particular label.

Finally, if you don't do so already, there's a means for you to subscribe to my blogposts via e-mail.  The subscription box is in the upper right.  If you choose to subscribe via this tool, it's anonymous...I only know how many subscribers I have, not who they are.

I need to thank Brandie at The Country Cook for some of the ideas I stole.  I had a pretty innovative blog back in the day when I first started things, but I guess I fell behind with the times.  I finally took the time to play a little catch up!