Summer vacation has been anything but relaxing so far. Without going into detail let it suffice to say that summer coursework, new puppy, kids’ soccer, and web-related projects have kept me hopping. There’s still plenty of work left to do, and some fun to be had. Things are starting to slow down just a bit. It’s all been great - except for the summer course which I may someday write about if I can get the bad taste out of my mouth. There were enough shortcomings with the delivery model that I don’t think I can fairly review what I got out of the experience.

Just before school let out at the end of May I sprung for a new iMac. I’ve been working with it a bit, but as I said, I’ve been busy with other things, so I haven’t looked carefully all of its new features. One of the projects that I wanted to get done was to get some RSS feeds organized. Bloglines is ok, but I get impatient with the screen refresh that is necessary each time I want to access a new feed. Other options such as Shrook and Thunderbird have their pluses and minuses. I read that Safari now has an RSS reader built into it. When I opened it I found dozens of feeds there by default, and they all seemed to be brief summaries. I like to read the whole text when I’m cruising through a lot of material, so I didn’t think I’d be interested in using Safari. However, Safari has now replaced Firefox as my default browser because I learned a little more about it through messing with it a bit, and the way it handles RSS is just too good to pass up. There is a little slider in a sidebar that lets you limit the content on any feed. The URL field displays an RSS button when a feed is available, and clicking on it causes the whole web page to kind of “liquify” into pure text. Bookmarking the feed allows me to file it to a folder. Tabbed browsing lets me do other work, like upload image files for projects while I’m scanning the feeds. Very nice.

That’s what I was doing this morning when I followed a link posted by David Weinberger to a blog called The Old Friar’s Blog. This is a new blog written by an articulate and reflective educator, recently retired, who is commenting on observations of 38 years in the field. I think this blog deserves some attention. I don’t expect to agree with everything he has to say, but so far the ring of truth does resonate with me. It seems that Friar’s motivation for blogging is much the same as mine was when I began this project several months ago.

I may, once I get myself a bit more organized, settle down and make a list of topics to write about, as he did, to outline some ideas for future posts.

It is nice to have a good RSS reader up and running again. I’m glad I didn’t miss this.