Virtual housecleaning

Sundays are for housecleaning online as well. I added an RSS feed button (that little orange box with a volume/speaker/RSS logo in it) for those of you who want to subscribe to La Vie Dansante. If you're not familiar with RSS feeds or feed readers, don't just zone out here.

Feed readers, such as Google Reader (which I'm a fan of), help you more efficiently read your favorite blogs and Web sites. Instead of going to each of the 15 or 150 blogs you like, you set up an account with a feed reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator, etc) and then "subscribe" to a blog either by clicking on the now ubiquitous orange box like the one at the top of this page or typing in the blog URL in the "add subscription" box in the reader.

Then, when you log into your reader, any new blog posts pop up in that screen. So why go through the hassle of doing this? If you take the time to set it up, it will save you the time of going to your favorite blogs every day just to find out if there's been a new post. If you only read 4-5 blogs, it's probably not worth it. But if you have several dozen that you at least want to keep an eye on, it is pointless to use your bookmark tab.

Also, I set up a Flickr account for GaGa so she can see all the adorable photos of Julian, but I haven't received any other friend requests from Flickr(!). I'll reiterate that Flickr is EASY TO JOIN and will be the ONLY WAY to see most of the kiddo pictures (I've given a sampling of the previous posts photos in this post). Just go to Flickr.com and sign up, then search "broylesa" and I should come up. Then hover over my photo and click "add as contact."

Web 2.0 is easy. Taking advantage of the social media functions of Web sites is fun. Like Gary Vaynerchuk says, Don't be a lurker!

I meant to post this on Sunday and do some housecleaning around addiebroyles.com, especially with the section of my clips from the Statesman. I've had a bunch of cool stuff lately that I've neglected to share on here or there, and I ran out of time yesterday to do so. Hopefully I'll find time later this week...

Oh, time, precious time.

Thought reduction

I found tweetstats.com via Twitter today. It gives you an idea of when, what and to whom you most frequently tweet. They do that cloud thing, which is basically a pie chart of words.

I've seen these before, but it's interesting when you look at them and realize they are, in cooking terms, a reduction of one's thoughts. At the least, it gives you a taste of what's been on my mind (or at least my Tweeting fingertips) in the past few months.

Julian meows (kindof)

I just got a cell phone (not for the first time; I've had to give them up to overcome a mild cell phone addiction I developed in college.), and it's proving to be pretty super cool. I got it mainly for work, and I went through wirefly.com for both the phone and the cell service. If you are a new customer, you can get mad deals. I ended up with a LG Shine that has a video camera and connects via bluetooth to my computer! I took this little video right before Julian went down for a nap just now. Technology these days...

We're headed to the new fountain park by Lady Bird Lake (Town Lake) to enjoy the perfect May day.

Why have you foresaken me, Knox Files?

The good and the bad of this Saturday morning:

Good: Ian and I just got 9+ hours of consecutive sleep. For only the second or third time since the boy was born, he did the all-nighter at someone else's house. He is out with Uncle Tom and Becca, where he slept from 11:30 to 7:30 without an early morning feeding. Maybe we're onto something here....

Bad: My external hard drive, knicknamed the Knox Files, where I store all of my photos and music, is currently not working on my computer or Ian's. We even tried another cord. No luck. I'm going to have to take it in. This sucks. My dear laptop still has all my music and most of my pictures, but for the past few months, I'd been dumping all the photos onto the hard drive. I have them on flickr, but if I lose the original files, I will be heartbroken. Any hardware experts out there have ideas?

Triste, triste. Maybe not as triste as friend Corey's motorcycle getting stolen out of the parking lot at his apartments (our old apartments), but still, sucky nonetheless.

Magical computer gods, bring my hard drive back to life! I will never curse you again!