Blogomatic

Our first blog was the EDR site way back in the good ol' days of 2005. That's 100 years ago in internet time. Since then (and maybe before) everyone and their mom has a blog. It's a cool way to check up on what's going on all around the world in your particular little universe. I'm too sloppy and unorganized to have them all neatly bookmarked, blah, blah I just peruse my favorites from memory (and cache) until I get tired of it and quit. Today, a friend of mine who is much more savvy than I, turned me onto something called RSS feeds. Maybe I'm the last one on the planet to discover this damn thing, but I doubt it. I had seen that little orange or blue icon a million times and just disregarded it as some silly time wasting shit like Twitter that I didn't need to investigate. Not so, grasshopper! We've since added a RSS feed to this blog, just click the little icon on the right, or go here. Here's the scoop on how it works:

Sign up for a gmail/google account (there are other ways, but this is how I did it)

Go to google, find the "more" link and go down and select "reader". This opens your "Google Reader" page.
Open a new page and go to one of your favorite blogs.

On my mac, the little orange icon is in the address bar, it's probably somewhere similar on PCs. Click on that icon. On the Biltwell page, it's over there on the right of the blog since ours is "embedded" on the site.

Then click "add to Google Reader".

Do this over and over for all the blogs you visit.

This will send all the new info posted on all the blogs you selected to your Google Reader page so you can check them all from one spot. You can tweak the settings to customize things. I just set mine to show all items. I checked "Mark all as read" on each after they loaded and that way new content will show up on the left with the number of new entries posted with a number in bold like (1) next to it. This way you can just check one place and if you see a new bold number, there is a new entry to read.

Probably way old news to lots of people and serious geek shit to the rest, but hopefully this is helpful to some. It was to me once I figured it out. Anything that means more time riding, and wrenching and less time being a keyboard commando is a good thing in my book.

While we are on the subject of blogs, let's talk doing your own blog. Updating your blog once a month = no class. Having zero original content = no class. If you are going to poach something from someone else's blog or website, give credit and try not to do it too often. A lesson can be learned from Chopper Dave, nude or partially nude girls, especially posed with motorcycles are pure class and worth sharing! Also, set your blog to archive every ten days or so. I love Max's blog like everyone else, but it crashes my machine because it's so damn long. (Google reader fixes that and only loads ten posts at a time.) Also, I personally dig stuff like Special 79's where he shows works in progress. Also CZ's where some super rad bikes and parts are often for sale.

OK, enough about computers, back to motorcycles now...
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