Travel plans update

I received some information about our travel plans yesterday. The current plan is for the four of us to meet at Harrisburg Discipleship Center (run by Eastern Mennonite Missions) for a day of training on Thursday morning.

We are scheduled to take off the following evening for Pakistan via London. I will be returning the evening of December 3rd.

Of course, this all hinges on whether or not our visas come through in time. Hopefully, Loren, the man who is taking care of trip organization while we're away, won't need to camp out at the Pakistani embassy in D.C. on Thursday night to get them.

RSS Feed

I recently found out that this blog has a RSS feed (Thanks to Donna for telling me!) Here it is:

http://shaneinpakistan.blogspot.com/rss.xml

If you want to keep track of what is being posted to this blog, this is a great way to do it.

What is RSS? It stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and it's an easy way to keep people up to date on your website or weblog. All you have to do is one of the following:

1. Install a news feed reader
2. Use a web based news feed reader
3. Set up your email client to download RSS feeds

Have a look at the Wikipedia page for more background on RSS.

My personal favorite way is to have Thunderbird (my email reading program aka. email client) download the RSS feeds from my subscribed sites along with the rest of my email. If you're an Outlook Express user, there is a plugin that you can install to have OE read RSS feeds. It's called RSS Popper

If read your webmail in Firefox (you are using Firefox to read web pages, aren't you?) there are several extensions that can help you with this. A very easy way to get feeds in Firefox is to use Live Bookmarks. Simply click on the orange icon on the right side of your address bar, and follow the instructions from there.

You can also download and install a stand-alone news feed reader. Do a web search for something like "RSS reader GPL" and you should have a zillion choices. (The GPL bit stands for GNU Public License. Basically, anything with this license is free to download and also free to modify. Since it's free to modify, GPL'd programs tend to not come with spyware, since any other geek out there can tell exactly what's going on and complain loudly.)

If you like, feel free to add a comment about your favorite method of dealing with RSS feeds, or keeping track of blogs in general.

Thanks for reading!