Light of Togo

IF YOU ARE STILL CONFUSED AFTER READING THIS, TRY WATCHING THIS VIDEO EXPLAINING RSS

If you are reading this, you’re probably asking, “What in the world is a news feed, and what does it eat?” OK, sorry for the silly pun, but I couldn’t resist. So, here goes an explanation that is hopefully as simple as possible. Basically a news feed allows you to be notified of any changes made to a particular website without actually having to visit that site every day, week, etc. In the case of our site, and most other blogs, you will be given a simple header or title to each new post. For example, for this post you would have received the title, “What is an RSS news feed?” If you’re interested in reading it, just click on it and you will be brought directly to the post on the website. If not, just ignore it! Now you haven’t wasted any time searching for something that you had no interest in reading in the first place. Brilliant huh? Now comes the slightly technical part. This is the part that answers, “OK, so how do I do this RSS thing?” First of all, you will want to look on our website for this icon: It should be near the very top of your screen.

Go ahead and click on it, and choose “Subscribe to RSS 2.0″ It’s very possible that your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) already has built in RSS capabilities. If so, then from here it should be fairly easy to follow the instructions and finish the process. If your browser does not recognize this request and gives you a bunch of gibberish “computer language” stuff, then you probably need to update to the latest version of Internet Explorer or Firefox (just a little tip: Firefox is way better!).

Most websites have news feeds, so if you like this idea, then there is also free dedicated software just for reading news feeds. For Windows, there is Thunderbird, which also does email, or Omea. For the Mac, try NetNewsWire. There’s also the web-based Google Reader. The benefit to these is that you can view all the postings from your favorite websites without having to visit each one. Believe me, this saves a lot of time and a lot of clicking around.

Now, if you’ve followed these instructions and are still having difficulties but still like to do this, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I can hopefully step you through it.

If you have successfully completed all of this, then you should now be able to view the post titles and give it a try. Bravo! You now have your very own RSS. Just make sure to feed him lots of news each day and…alright, I’ll stop now.

IF YOU ARE STILL CONFUSED AFTER READING THIS, TRY WATCHING THIS VIDEO EXPLAINING THE CONCEPT OF BLOGS.

If this is the first time you’ve visited a blog, then let me officially be the first to welcome you to blogopia. “Blog” is short for “web log.” It’s basically a website where one can write things, called “posts.” What things you ask? Anything! Most blogs have a very specific subject or topic, such as news, sports, technology, etc. Our blog will contain posts about anything that is going on in our lives, in Togo, and in our ministry. Because the information is ongoing, the most recent posts are listed first, at the top of the page, followed by the next most recent and so on.

On the right side of the page, you will see the organization of the blog. This will connect you to other posts. Each post has a category and tags. All tags are listed there, the largest being the most frequently occurring tags. For an example, a post about Joshua’s recent birthday party would be under the general category of “family,” but also might have the tags: family, friends, Joshua, photos, and quebec. These are all things related to, in some way, the content of the post. If you’re interested in one certain recurring topic in our blog, let’s say “ministry,” then just click that tag in the right column and you will be presented with every post that has the ministry tag. How nice!

The other organization is pretty simple. Recent posts show…well…the most recent posts (go figure!), and the archives contain all of the older posts listed by date.

Well, there you go…you are now a blog expert!