Thanks, and a festive Festivus to all of you.

Thanks, same to you and yours. It's all over and done with here already. We're impatient little bastards and can't wait until Festivus morning to open our presents.

Btw, I was recently editing that guitar post of yours that I linked on the Goof, and noticed that when I saved it, I inadvertently sent out another trackback ping to your blog entry. Please feel free to delete the extraneous ping.

I can't figure out why MT is doing this, and how I can prevent it from happening again. I've posted a query in the MT support forum and will hopefully be told that I'm a complete dolt for not realizing how simple the answer is, or else be hailed as a hero for uncovering a heinous bug in the interface, or something.

Oh well, time for bed. Hopefully, these constant hallucinations of dancing sugar plums that I'm having will subside enough to let me get to sleep.

Thanks!!!
Do you have the pole up?

Well, of course, Michelle! It just wouldn't be Festivus if we didn't have the pole up:

http://reality.sgiweb.org/mattm/balihai/images/Festivus2003.jpg

Oh, and if you're reading this, M.Ace, turning off TrackBack autodiscovery stops it from sending out multiple pings.

Okay. I've never had the auto-discovery turned on. Trackback... I know it's there, but I don't really concern myself with it. It's not just for breakfast!

But now I've upgraded to MT 2.65 and updated my news feeds. Four varieties now, including Atom. Why? Beats me.

Yeah, trackback is kind of a pain to implement correctly and yet another source of spam, but it's handy to know who's linking to you.

As for the RSS feeds, that's a mountain I'll have to climb on another day. I don't understand the concept at all.

Crimony, another MT upgrade? I just did that a couple of weeks ago.

RSS makes more sense if you think of it from the client side. You can check a whole load of (feed-equipped) blogs for new stuff in a flash, rather than slogging through all of their web pages (though I still haven't found a news reader client that I like - the last one I tried insisted on dredging up IE for function). You can plug in feed addresses here to get the idea:

http://soapclient.com/rss/rss.html

It's the endless format varieties that are... oh, let's say, curious.

Ohhhh, a newsreader...now I get it. Being the old Usenet geek that I am, I've never found anything better than rn or tin, especially when it comes to filtering abilities, but they're command-line interfaces for Unix boxen. I shudder to think what kind of form they'd take for Windoze.

I use the Mozilla newsreader these days, since the only groups I read are in the comp.sys.sgi hierarchy.

Well, I don't think it's the same newsreaders that you would use for newsgroups, but you get the idea. Here's a reference page of RSS readers, which is probably the more correct name for them (don't mind me).

http://www.lights.com/weblogs/rss.html

You can also pull RSS feeds into your own web page (ala /.'s customizable sidebar boxes).

Thanks for the clarification. The links you provided were very useful. I've got the hang of it now.