Things progress at a snail’s pace. Upon returning from Michigan, my first task was to finish the exterior of the Attic Addition as mentioned below. This has been done as of last Wednesday. I’ll be taking The Test sometime soon, but beyond that and a couple of other things still in the chute, things are very much in the air. It’s rather frustrating, in an “I wonder what will happen next” sort of way. All roads lie open. At times like this I wish I smoked a pipe.
In the words of a certain fictional fellow, “I must have an occupation, or I shall go mad.”
In this how-to, I do not attempt to give you all the whys and wherefores. I’ll show you how to syndicate, and if you want to learn more, follow the links to other resources.
We will be using RSS 2.0 for simplicity and sheer novelty. You have zero (0) points.
Preparation
First, ask yourself whether your website is suitable for syndication. The best candidates are regularly updated sites whose content can naturally be divided into distinct “items,” each with their own unique URL. This is the kind of architecture that RSS newsreaders will expect your site to have, and anything else could cause “undefined behaviour.”
If at this point your eyes have glazed over, subtract 5 points from your score.
Step 1: Create the RSS file
RSS is quite simple, really. At its core it is basically a text file describing the most recent headlines on your site. You don’t need to know all about XML to create RSS files, just a text editor and a good eye.
Grab a raw RSS file and examine it, with a view to adapting it to your own needs. You could use ours, or one from another site. By looking at multiple examples of existing news feeds, you can get an idea of what kind of data you can include in your own file. Also, Userland provides a good reference for the RSS 2.0 format, which will help explain what you’re seeing in those RSS files.
A word about format: Some sites include only a headline and a URL, some syndicate the entire article, and some sites offer a headline and only the first paragraph or so. It depends on how you envision people using your RSS feed.
If you want someone to be able to read your site using only a newsreader, obviously include the entire contents of each article.
If you mainly are providing headlines for other websites, usually only a headline and one paragraph is necessary.
When you’re ready, pick one of those files and change everything in it to match your website’s information. Save it as index.xml and put it in your website’s root directory.
Add 23 points if you actually created a draft XML file and are feeling pretty good about yourself.
Bonus question: Why, exactly, does Paul Ford dislike RSS 2.0?
Step 2: Testing
First of all, validate your feed to ensure compatibility.
Also, definitely find and download a news reader program so you can test your news feed. I like Feedreader, although it has a few bugs yet.
If you simply cannot get your RSS to validate, pass 13 points to the person at your left and go to jail.
Step 3: Going Live
When everything checks out, link to the index.xml file from the home page (at least) and generally let people know it’s there and how to use it. When you’re really confident, submit your site to syndicators like Syndic8 and NewsIsFree.
Also, add the following code into the <head> section of all or most of your pages:
This alerts any automated program that may be scanning your site that an RSS feed is available.
Good Job
Roll the dice. Add 17 points to your total score, regardless of what number comes up. If you have more than 20 points, you have earned yourself a big glass of grape juice.
You had just gone into the den to grab your coffee mug, which you’d left there after breakfast; but when you saw the dingy paperback, your presence of mind failed you, and you paused. It somehow recalled the scratchy, stuffy days of your elementary education, and it rather sickened you. You looked out the window: it was raining. I have to get out of here, you thought. You might have stood there all morning, but in the rapidly thickening clouds of your mind, something told you to back out of the room and take a breath. And immediately the skies parted, you laughed at yourself, and you were home again, with twenty years safely between you and the starched collars of your youth.
This is what a drowning man must feel like when he’s gone down, down, and felt the water entering his lungs and the lights going out, and then been hauled up and given his life back by some brave stranger. You’re a little more grateful for having gone through it. Maybe when he’s got over it, the nearly-drowned man will go back every now and again, and have a look at the lake that nearly was his grave, and take fresh joy in the fact that it didn’t get him after all. That’s fine up to a point; but it isn’t healthy to do it too often.
But there are differences between you and the drowning man. You had friends at the bottom of your lake, people you knew and joked with and who had some good points about them. You can never go back and see them; for one thing your soul revolts at revisiting that episode in any way, shape or form; and for another, they are gone. It’s too bad they didn’t all turn out like you. They would have been happier.
And maybe in another five or ten years, you will go back into that den, perhaps to pack its contents into boxes for a move, and you will come across more dingy paperbacks and yellowed notebooks. Some of them are missing; you loaned them away, and truth be told you’re actually glad they were never returned. You will never read them; and someday the sight and smell of them may throw you into a gray reverie from which you never emerge. Listen! If you have any sense, you will burn them in the firepit and then take a short walk with your wife. Better a small loss of sentiment than the straightjacket.
— JD
“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”
—Pascal, Pensees, 1670
Four families of sparrows have moved into the roof of our second-story addition (one in each corner of the roof). This is owing to our negligence in putting up the soffit and stucco siding. I can’t let them stay there. I can’t just cover the nests; they’re full of baby sparrows. It falls to me to figure out what to do with them. And as of today, my attempts at being merciful and humane to the first two nests have failed.
I put the nests into a plastic bowl, trying to handle it as little as possible, and put it up under the eaves not far from the original location. Either the parents can’t find them or for some reason they won’t get near them, because in each case, the chicks are dead next morning.
The Calvinist will tell me, I suppose, that God is sovereign and knew whether those birds would have turned to a life of sin. Then, too, the Charismatic would say that I didn’t have enough faith, or the birds didn’t, or both; and the Catholic will tell me those birds are in hell because they were never baptised.
But joking aside, I can foresee myself getting tired of burying dead baby birds.
We just spent a week at the cabin, near Longville, MN. We caught enough fish to serve for dinner thirteen people; by “we,” I mean a priviledged minority, and when I say “priviledged minority, I mean mainly people other than myself, by which I mean my sister’s fiancée John. Oh well.
Paige and I were able to play a few Irish tunes at a local coffee shop on Friday afternoon, which was a first.
Regarding chess and the writing of clever fiction: though not often combined, an enjoyable constellation of the two can be found in The Thompson Stories.
If your average man
When writing a girl
And putting his paper to pencil
Professes his love is "too wondrous for words,"
Then mark my advice and my counsel:
His flattering pleas
Are not worth a reply
Though he blush while he stammers and stutters
If he cannot find words to say just what he means,
Then his mind is all berries and butters.
But if by some chance
Or strange circumstance
Some fellow should bore you with speeches,
Detailing his fancies in ongoing rants
All of daisies and jewels and peaches,
Don't feel you must listen
To all of his drab,
Though his mind may be built like a castle;
For the fact is his heart is all cardboard and crabs
And such fellows are nothing but hassle.
A fellow, it’s true
Who means nothing to you
Neither blushes, nor rants of his passion
Should never be sought, but be quickly forgot
Like a hat that has gone out of fashion
You'll know the right one
By his heart and his tongue,
Brimming over with feeling and praises
And though he may stammer and stutter at times
You’ll find joy in his thoughts and his gazes.
“Work hard, play hard.” Here is a line to live by: Both to perform your responsibilities, and to enjoy life’s blessings, with all your energy. You are most alive when you are most exhausted. The less energy you spend, the less there is to tell you from a houseplant or a paving stone. Now this says nothing about what, exactly, our responsibilities are, or what life’s blessings are. On those things people differ: some are wrong and some are right. But there is no sense in doing things by halves. “What thou doest, do quickly” was said to a man who was farther wrong than most. The fading, flickering mind is more dangerous than the raging fire of zeal.
[We normally do not run ads this long, but I have to say, at twelve cents a word, we made quite a bit of money on this one. —JD]
Wanted: A dashing young actor with a long face to play the lead role in The Final Stages, a new play written by the famed Edwin Nathaniel Dowdley and to be produced in Pequod Lake. The play, set in a nameless, generic, and in all other ways stereotypical European city during Christmastime, concerns a young man named Milo Merriwit, who, wandering the streets after his father’s financial collapse and death, and fingering the only coin left to him by his father, chances upon some carolers and merry-makers in the streets. He joins in with them, dancing and singing, until the coin falls through a hole in his pocket. Someone else hears it hit the street, and snatches it up, whereupon Milo chases the young man down and around the circuitous streets, hoping to gain back his money. The thief ducks into a back door. Milo follows him in, and finds himself in the dark, in a huge closet of costumes, by which the audience learns that this building is a theatre. Suddenly a stage-hand shines a candle in his face, grabs him and pushes him onto the brightly lit stage.
There the actors happen to be in the final act of a tragic play called The Gardener of Gloucester, in which the young Sir Clyve, knowing that Sir Ranulf is gaining an edge in their battle for the Lady Sylvia’s affections, switches places with her gardener in order to be near her at all times. The switch is effected very smoothly, for he and the gardener look very much alike. Over the course of weeks, Sir Clyve trims the hedges into elaborate sculptures as secret tokens of his affection, and by and by Sylvia realizes it is he. Meanwhile the gardener is enjoying his newfound power, until Sir Ranulf discovers him by the dirt under his fingernails. A man of intelligence, he remembers the elaborate hedges and realizes what is going on. He throws the gardener in prison, and runs to the fountain at the center of the garden, where he finds the Sir Clyve and the Lady Sylvia talking to each other and holding hands. In a fit of rage he rushes at Clyve with his dagger, but Sylvia thrusts herself in his path and is stabbed unavoidably. Ranulf steps back in horror, but in true stage fashion, slips on some wet stones and is impaled on the fountain statue of an angel bearing a sword. Clyve hears footsteps, and hides behind a hedge just as servants and soldiers arrive. Seeing the tragic scene, they deduce that Clyve killed them both out of jealousy. Grief-stricken, and with no way to clear his name, Sir Clyve remains in hiding as a gardener, and is ironically called upon to arrange the flowers at Sylvia and Ranulf’s double-funeral. He remains a gardener to his dying days, always trimming hedges into intricate sculptures, and the original gardener remains imprisoned in the dungeon for the rest of his life.
At least, that is how the play normally goes, but Milo has now become the starring actor by some strange accident. He saw this play once before and the sad ending left him very depressed and angry. Now, finding himself in the story, something in him snaps. As the final heart-rending chords of the music drone on, he throws off his cap and shouts in a hoarse voice, “Behold! It is I, Sir Clyve!”, rushes to the open coffin, and with great effort hoists the “dead” Sir Ranulf into air, who opens his eyes in alarm as he is heaved into the orchestra pit, right in the middle of the string section. Now fully possessed by a spirit of theatric justice, Milo knocks the dungeon guard out cold and frees the hapless gardener, then lifts Sylvia out of her coffin and gives her a long passionate kiss, just as the theatre manager finally drops the curtain as hard as he can.
From the loud laughter and cheering of the audience, it becomes apparent that the new ending is a stunning success. The laughter and applause grow louder when the theatre manager goes up to inqure if there is a doctor in the house, evidently to treat the unconscious dungeon guard and the badly bruised Sir Ranulf. Sensing an opportunity, he goes to meet Milo backstage, to try convince him to join the company and give repeat performances, but Milo has fled for fear of being arrested or charged with some crime. But one thing Milo cannot flee from: the thought of the actress who played Sylvia on the stage.
Thus ends Act I of The Final Stages. Applicants must possess theatrical bombast and ready wit. Interested actors please notify E. Dowdley, of 212 Outspar Ave.
On the stony streets I stood
On the rink of Aalder’s icy stream
On the rim of Aalder’s graying wood,
And watched the church up on the rise
Whose sight had filled my latest dreams.
They say the building looks its best
When the common clouds are barely sailing
When the creeping coldness brings its test.
It grows, seems nearer to our eyes
Beside the timber’s ashen paling.
When the town was small and bare,
The sometime men of Aalder laid its base
They hewed its stones to build its stony stair;
They cast the spire-bells, whose cries
Have tolled of joy and death’s embrace.
Who taught those men? You well may ask,
And how they learned to build so strong and tall;
But it’s sure their powers surpassed their task
For though each neighboring building dies
The church on the hill refuses to fall.
Newer steeples down below
Now long since have sprung up to supplant,
And the elder all but overthrow;
Though its halls were old and wise
Angels elsewhere more are visitant.
To tear it down I once took thought
To ruin what for years in ruin stood,
Killing hope where hope and aid was sought;
As heavy words in heaven’s guise
Dimmed our eyes to grace and good.
Then I remembered Ahab’s whale
And how such foes are better left alone,
How woe on woe is heaped in all such tales;
Sorrows came never in single spies
For men with vengeance in their bones.
So I, like others, left its doors;
Now I sing and bear a better load,
Feeling yet the bruise of older sores
When once we leave, we realize
That life is more than they forebode.
Once a fount of song and tears
As a few of us remember still
Though wasted now it stands by waning years
As stone from stone the ivy pries
So goes the church up on the hill.
Not far from our house is a picturesque little church, which you see photographed above. It was the sight of this, on just such a cloudy day, that led to this poem, and I worked on it sporadically from November to June.
