Running into a strange symbol

If you’ve been roaming the Internet a lot you may have noticed this symbol:

RSS feed symbol

You find it at the end of the address bar of a lot of sites. Sometimes you find it in the upper right or upper left corner of a website. Usually it’s accompanied by a little bit of text. Something like “posts” or “comments” or “RSS”.
Have you ever wondered what it meant?

Don’t miss anything

Maybe you visit a lot of sites. You’ve noticed over the years that sites are changing. A few years ago sites were static. You would visited them ones a year and hardly anything would have been changed. But lately it’s a very different story. Many sites, including mine, change on an almost daily basis.

So you do what you’ve always done. You come across a website that’s of interest to you and you add the address to your favorites folder and ones in a while you go back.
But slowly you notice that’s it’s become nearly impossible to read all the changes of all the sites that are of interest to you. With all the interesting site your favorites folder keeps growing and to make matters worse some site can add a lot of articles in a week. Some only add a few hundred words but with others it can be as much as a few thousand of words in a week.

Have you ever thought how nice it would be if you could get some kind of warning every time one of your favorite sites adds an article?

Get a warning

You can get a warning! Free of charge!

Many websites, including mine, offer their regular visitors the option to get a warning every time an article is added.
My site actually offers two systems to get a warning when “See me draw” is updated.

You can subscribe to an email service that is send out only when there is a new article on “See me draw” or you can subscribe to something called a “RSS feed”.
Email is the old trusted way of getting a warning.
RSS is the new up and coming way. Only a fraction of Internet users use it or even know what it is.

Warning by email

But let me start out with telling you how you can get an email warning for updates on “See me draw”.
It’s actually very easy.
You just click the title of this article. That will take you to a page with only one article. This one. When you scroll down you find a form just below this article. With this form you can subscribe to an email that will warn you for updates on “See me draw”.
When you’ve entered your email address in this form you’ll notice that there are two save guards. The first save guard you’ll see is to prevent spambots from entering thousands of addresses. (I’m not quite sure why they would want to do that, but they do.) The second is to prevent someone from playing a practical joke on you and subscribing you to lots of mails you don’t want.

The warning mail does have a few drawbacks.
This is kind of an art site. I’m learning how to draw the pictures in my mind and publishing those drawings on my site.
With every email you’ll receive the complete story of the new article but for the drawing you’ll have to visit the site.
And then, of course, there is spam. Some people get loads of spam and it’s getting very difficult to find the few interesting emails among the mountains of spam.

What do you need to use RSS

As I said RSS is the new and upcoming way of communicating on the Internet. It combines the best of email with the best of websurfing.

Surfing the web is a perfect way of finding loads of new information but it’s a bit awkward when you want to regularly visit the same sites.
With email it used to be very easy to subscribe to information that is of interest to you but with all the spam it’s becoming next to impossible to use it.

An RSS feed reader is a piece of software that goes onto the Internet and gathers webpages in the same way that a web browser does. But before it gathers those pages you have to subscribe to them in the same way as you would subscribe to a mailing list.

The RSS program

RSS is a abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication or for Rich Site Summary or… There are a number of explanations. It’s a special kind of code that looks something like this:

<title>The .NET Schema Object Model</title>
<link>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/som.html</link>
<description>Priya Lakshminarayanan describes in detail the use of the .NET Schema Object Model for programmatic manipulation of W3C XML Schemas.</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>SVG’s Past and Promising Future</title>
<link>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/04/svg.html</link>

and will go on for page after page. Not something you would want to get in you mailbox, would you.

To use RSS you need a program called a RSS feed reader. RSS Feed readers come in two flavors:

Online RSS feed readers:
• Bloglines
• Google Reader
• Gritwire
• News Alloy

Offline RSS feed readers:
• Feedreader
• Omea Reader
• Sharpreader
• Awasu
• Newzcrawler
• FeedDemon
• Stardock

I’ve used an offline RSS feed reader for a few years but recently switch to an online RSS feed reader. If you don’t have any experience with RSS feed readers I would advice you to use an online RSS feed reader. Although they basically work the same, with an online RSS feed reader you don’t have to install anything and you can read your RSS feeds were ever you find a computer.

I use Bloglines. Which is a RSS feed reader that’s perfectly suited for people who follow a large amount of RSS feeds. I follow about 190 RSS feeds. For someone who reads less RSS feeds the Google reader is also a very good choice.
I don’t have any experience with Gritwire and News Alloy but I’ve read there both are fine RSS feed readers.
The only thing you have to do to use the service is to subscribe to the site. Usually entering your name and email address is enough to use the RSS feed reader.

As for the offline RSS feed readers. They work about the same. You install the program. Sometimes you also have to tell the program where to find your browser. After that you can start adding RSS feeds.
The first four RSS feed readers in the list are free.
Both the Opera and Firefox browsers have build in RSS feed readers.

Subscribing to a RSS feed

Subscribing to the RSS feed is as easy as subscribing to the email.
When you use an online RSS feed reader you only have to click on the RSS symbol that you’ll find in the left upper corner of this site. That will send you to a page were a number of online RSS feed readers is listed. You click the link of your service and your done.
When you use an offline RSS feed reader you have to copy the address of this website to your RSS feed reader and the RSS feed reader will search for the address of the RSS feed and ask you to confirm that address. After adding a RSS feed you have to push the “update” button on your offline RSS feed reader to have it download the new articles.

Update

A few months ago Bloglines developed a bug that had me re-reading articles I had already read. I complained about it but the bug was never fixed. I didn’t even got an answer.
Although it was an annoying little bug I still liked Bloglines.
Two weeks ago they got server problems. Some of my feeds were gone. Including the feed I use to find new sites for my “Featured on See me draw” series. Despite my complains they did nothing to repair it.

I’ve switch to Google reader and although it takes some getting used to I must say that I’m happy with the switch.
The Google reader does have some good points: Articles are marked read after you’ve read them instead of marking the whole feed the moment you open it. It’s also very easy to save article you like.
A minor disadvantage is that the automatic “read” marker takes a little time. So while scrolling down the program stalls every few seconds.

Erase a flower

Erase a flower

The purpose of this drawing was to find out how many layers of pigment you can erase. I could have drawn a lot of browns and erased that, but what’s the fun in that. I mix some colors and found:

• Erasing one color works nicely (top left) but if it’s a light color you can hardly see the difference even when you put a second color on top.
• Putting three colors on top of each other (lower middle) is pointless since you can’t see the third color. Erasing three colors has the same result as erasing two colors. When you put a fourth color on top and blend them you can’t see the result.
• Erasing two colors gave something of a surprise. When you erase two layers of pigment some pigment is left but it’s not always the color you’d expect.
  When mixing orange with green on top you get a brownish color and when you erase it the color becomes lighter but doesn’t completely disappear. But when the bottom color is purple or green with a different color on top, the color that’s left after erasing isn’t a mix of those two colors but a light blue.

Link

I came across the website of this Canadian guy, Sebastien, who makes really nice looking comic book style drawings