Here is a test blog from my cell phone.

Edit: I was just playing around with some software that I can’t talk about yet. Unfortunately I don’t have a cell phone with a keyboard, so it makes this a lot less fun than it otherwise would be, but it’ll let me blog from places where I might not have my computer.

Just a test, this has only been a test, please move onto the next post. Thank you very much! This concludes this test of the cell phone broadcasting network. 🙂

It’s very interesting watching someone use an RSS Aggregator for the first time. Maryam finally got interested in it after hearing me talk for the past three years about how much more productive it is to read people’s blogs in a news aggregator.

She just frustrated me asking “how come I can’t find a feed on Anita Rowland’s blog?” I answered back “if your feed reader was decent it should just tell you that there’s a feed there.”

But, personally, I hate blogs that don’t have an orange icon to explain they have a feed. Here are the two icons you should have on your page if you have a feed (choose one — I like the “old-school” XML icon, but that’s just me — the trick is to have at least ONE of these on your page so that visually your readers will know instantly that you have an RSS or Atom feed to subscribe to):   

The BBC goes with an “RSS” orange icon, which is OK with me, since it’s still simple to figure out. I LOVE how they handle the icon (far better than how I do it on my blog). They put a “What is RSS?” link next to the icon. I should do that here.

Anyway, Maryam finally whined enough to get me to pull up Anita’s blog in both IE and Firefox, looking for a freaking feed. NewsGator and Attensa can’t find one. I can’t find one.

Blogs without RSS feeds piss me off. But now I remember why I don’t read Anita anymore even though everytime I’m at her blog I like what she writes about.

Non-English bloggers have another problem: they might have a feed but their feed might break RSS News Aggregators. For instance, this Persian blogger’s feed breaks Apple’s Safari, which is how Maryam is trying to subscribe to various feeds.

If you don’t make your RSS feed easy to find and use, you’re losing readers.

Oh, and please do subscribe to my feed.

BoingBoing posted an update on that jailed videojournalist (he also does a video blog), Josh Wolf. Turns out there’s a fundraiser tomorrow night in San Francisco.