Infinity + 1

Did you notice this feature when you started your blog? If you want to jumpstart your TR blog with some content from somewhere else, then you can supply the feed in Blog Settings.

The cool thing is you can comment on each item in that feed. And the site will poll for updates throughout the day.

You shouldn't see this problem on the site anymore. A patch was applied yesterday that should fix it.

Some more fixes were deployed today. One that will please a lot of users is returns actually show up as breaks. This affects your blog posts as well as your professional biography.

An RSS feed link for each user's blog was added as well.

Enjoy!

Some new blog features were deployed yesterday afternoon.

As I'm typing this, I'm able to use an improved editor: it facilitates
text formatting, hyperlinking and image insertion in blog posts.

Also, you can edit or delete your own posts. Woohoo!

Several new features came out today for you:

1. Links - this allows you to bookmark any URL, tag
   it and share it with others at TechRepublic. It's a centralized
   location for your bookmarks. This can be especially handy if you're not
   always at the same workstation throughout the day.
2. Blog Door - this lets you see the most recent blog postings as well as those postings from your contacts. It (along with a link to the People page) are in the blue nav bar below the search box.
3. Community Navigation - we've added links at the top of pages to
   make it easier to get to your personalized community features like
   discussions, blogs and links.

Please let us know what you think of these features. Enjoy!

TechRepublic now has a tag results page that will show you everything
associated with that tag according to what you clicked on. For
instance, if you clicked on a tag for a discussion post, you would then
go to a tabbed page showing all discussions with that same tag. Other
tabs on that page would allow you see to see people, blogs or links
with that tag.

Give it it a try and let us know how you like it.

With the ever-growing presence of technology in the home, many
households depend on one of the kids to handle setup and maintenance of
computers, routers and other tech equipment.

Is there a website(s) out there that you use when you have questions
about IT in your home? It seems like a lot of sites would be geared
toward the enterprise business IT professionals. Is there something out
there for those who need answers for their IT questions at home? Is
there a need for this kind of resource?

I hope you like the new features on the TechRepublic Blog page. We replaced the newest and hottest blogs with a list of the latest blog posts from all member blogs.

Also, we added a featured bloggers feature and a link to see all featured bloggers. The featured blogger changes every half hour.

If you're really into RSS feeds (if you haven't tried them, give them a shot), RSS feeds are available for the posts from the featured bloggers as well as the newest blog posts.

I'd love to hear what you think about these features and others. Thanks

I just wanted to post a a link and some info for anyone interested in learning more about Katrina's affect on New Orleans.

A relative of mine works as a city planner and lives in New Orleans
(until recently). He had this to say about the subsequent government
reaction to the devastation:

Speaking as a city planner who LIVES in New Orleans and took a
class devoted to New Orleans' vulnerability in grad school, some events
are simply of such a staggeringly great scale that even the best
planning can't provide organized solutions (I hope that most of you
other planners out there can agree).  I can assure all those angry
folks out there that this is not simply a matter of governmental
incompetence.  Is the government helping quickly enough? 
Absolutely not. BUT this disaster is completely without precedent, and
the fact that the city is surrounded by water and the people still
aren't perfectly centralized slows down rescue efforts tremendously.
This simply isn't a matter of the country not having "big enough
governmental relief"; this is a superhuman disaster completely outside
of the reach of any government. Repeat this same catastrophe elsewhere
and i can assure you the results would be equally devastating.  We
can only do the best we can with abilities that are simply inferior to
the forces of nature.

Also, he's started a blog to keep people informed on the status of the metro area by neighborhood.

I know it's been a while since I last posted. Changes have been rolling
out although a lot of them aren't that visible to site users, but here
is one that is: blog searching.

If you go here, now you'll see a search box in the middle of the page. You can now search the site's blogs for whatever you're interested in.

You may not have been aware that member blogs were not searchable from
the site's regular search pages. Eventually, they'll be searchable from
there too. For now, you can use this feature in the blog area of the
site.

Have fun blogging, reading other members' blogs, and now searching in the TechRepublic blogs for what interests you.

Doug

Many of you have probably tried Google Desktop Search. You download and
install it on your workstation. It then indexes files on your
workstation and allows you to search them.

I've tried it, and it was OK. It is much easier to find for downloading than Yahoo's product if you are just using site navigation. However, I like Yahoo's product from that point on.

For instance, I use Yahoo's Instant Messenger (YIM) client exclusively.
Google won't or can't index messages in that client, so that's a pretty
big strike against Google's product. I use instant messaging a lot,
since many of the people that I work with are in other offices.

Also, I prefer Yahoo's results interface. You're presented with a tab
for each kind of file: Email, Attachments, Contacts, IM, Documents,
Pictures, Music and All, which combines all the results.

In addition, Yahoo's product provides at least one configuration option
that you can only get with Google's if you download an extension
(unless they've enhanced it since I last used it). Yahoo allows you to
specify where the index files are stored.

For some people, none of this may sound like a deal breaker, but it was the difference that has made me happy to switch.

What is it? It is yet another rapid web development framework like Ruby on Rails. This one, though, is based on Python.

You're probably thinking I'm kind of cynical about this Turbogears or
Python. Not too much. It's just that everyone seems to want their
favorite tool to be like someone else's ("I have a tool that can do
that. Me, too."). Well, what's the point of that? If everyone does that
to their favorite tool, then all tools become similar, bloated messes.
Why not just build tools for a specific group of tasks and leave it at
that?

Anyway, if you're interested in Turbogears, Ruby on Rails or Python, then click on one of them to see a list of links that are tagged with that term.

Here's to rapid web development!