Me fail English? That's unpossible.

There's been so much heavy stuff going on lately that I need a little bit of a break, so my post for this evening will make no mention whatsoever of the war in Iraq, abuse of prisoners, presidential politics, gruesome beheadings, the lack of WMD's, the stock market, the job market, or the meat market.

Worship Is Optional...

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Yes, I am a grammar god. Note my use of the lower-case "g," indicating that I am not an actual deity; although, some people have occasionally thought so. ;-) Now, anyone that goes over any of my posts, especially this one, and discovers any grammatical errors will suffer my divine wrath. All supposed grammatical errors you find are due to deficiencies in the English language, not in my grammar. Just so we're clear on that.

BTW: those of you that are major Simpsons geeks will recognize the headline quote. It's from the character Ralph Wiggums, and I grabbed it from the cool Wikiquote site, which I found via Dean Esmay.

Puto deus fio
Translation: "[Dear me!] I think I'm turning into a God..."

Another quote from the Wikiquotes site; this one attributed to the Roman emperor Vespasian on his death bed. It seemed appropriate, given that I'm a grammar god and all. Being a pseudo-deity, I need to have an appropriate handwriting style, so I was pleased by the following result.

Of course, I am spiritual, and people do look to me for advice, especially on grammar. I also find it highly appropriate that they, at times, find me difficult to understand, as it is traditional amongst deities to be - how shall I say it? - rather opaque. Since I've been recognized as divine, there will be no jokes about the "well-rounded" part, capiche? I'm positive that it's not a reference to my body shape...Positive, I say!

Rome Wasn't Built In a Day

And neither was this blog! Perhaps you, my three regular readers, have noticed that I've been doing a bit of work on my blog lately - nothing major, in terms of look-and-feel, just a couple of minor tweaks. The most important change is that I've finally added an RSS feed to my blog, so that anyone wanting to syndicate my site can do so.

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS and syndication, it's a pretty cool technology that allows you to keep track of updates to a multitude of news and information sources simultaneously via a type of software known as a "news aggregator." Using a news aggregator, you don't have to spend a lot of time surfing the web to find new content from your favorite web sites. You simply syndicate the site (which basically means to tell the news aggregator program where the RSS or RDF file for the site is). When the content on a syndicated site changes, the RSS file is updated. The news aggregator program sees that the RSS file is changed and alerts the user that new content is available. The news aggregator gives you a link to the new content, plus a headline and (usually) a short description of the new content. You'll find the link to the RSS feed for this site over in the left hand column of my journal page. It looks like this:

The URL for the feed is http://home.comcast.net/~pete-nelson/rss.xml. That's the URL you give to your news aggregator to syndicate my site. Find a news aggregator you like (there's lots of them and many are free), and give it a try. I'm using the freeware FeedReader program, but I'm going to try out several others. If I find one I really like, I'll post about it here.

Because I use the lame Comcast Personal Web Pages to host my site, my site syndication has one minor issue: the RSS XML file is sent out by Comcast's web server with a MIME type of text/plain, which isn't correct. It should be sent as application/xml or something along that line. For those of you non-geek folks, this just means that the web server isn't identifying the RSS file correctly, which might cause some news aggregators to reject the file. I've syndicated my own site with the FeedReader news aggregator, and it works fine, but I thought I should mention this potential problem. If you do run into an issue with that, I apologize ahead of time, because I won't be able to do anything about it. It's a problem with Comcast's Personal Web Pages web servers, and their customer support for issues with PWP's is sadly lacking.

All's Well That Ends Well

And I'm ending this post. It's the end of my day, and I'm really tired. I pray that that tomorrow finds all of you healthy and happy.

Good night!

Permanent link