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Welcome to the Oddblog, where we prattle on incessantly about bug fixes, feature additions and all things Oddpost. Click "comments" to add your two cents, unless those two cents are a bug report or feature request, in which case we kindly request that you email bugs@oddpost.com or features@oddpost.com. Finally, note that if there are no announcements on a given day, it does in fact mean we were out blowing your subscriber dollars on handcrafted doilies and pink champagne.
On the off chance that there is a reader of this blog who does not already know what RSS is, let us explain, for yesterday we launched RSS aggregation within Oddpost (please see our new, improved Learn More page). So what is RSS? Well, the problem with blogs, especially this one, is that you never know when they're going to be updated. So you bookmark the page, check back every once in a while, find no new content, get annoyed, and end up watching Gymkata on cable. If you read a lot of blogs, you run into this problem often, and nobody should be subjected to Gymkata more than once. Fortunately, RSS (which stands for Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on your handedness) solves this problem and a few you didn't even know you had. Briefly, RSS is just another format that blogs are published in, only this format is not meant to be read by you, it's meant to be read by a computer. Specifically, RSS "feeds" are meant to be read by a new kind of application called a news aggregrator (please note that we're aware of the fact that aggregator is not a word, but it is the non-word that the people have chosen). A news aggregator lets you subscribe to a bunch of different blogs, so that new content comes to you, rather than you having to go search for it. So why is it called a news aggregator, and not a blog aggregator? It's because RSS has caught on with traditional news organizations as well, and now you can subscribe to feeds from the New York Times, the BBC, The Christian Science Monitor, and many, many more.
Now, the problem with news aggregators is that you have to go find one, then download, install and learn it. And when you're reading a story in your news aggregator and decide you want to forward it to a friend, you have to copy it, launch your mail application, compose the mail...wouldn't you rather just hit the Forward button? Of course you would. So, we've built news and blog aggregation into Oddpost. Just go to File->Subscribe to News Source... and get to it. Note that once you're subscribed to a feed, you can right-click on its folder and choose Subscription Properties to control how you view it. One particularly cool option is the ability to view a feed's link target in the message pane, which means you can view a story in Oddpost just as if you were viewing it as a web page. And hey, blogs that support comments have a comment link right in the message header area, and you can track your favorite news story or most-feared competitor using the Google News tracker. Please check it all out!
1:17:54 PM 
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© Copyright 2003 Oddpost, Inc.
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