Blog Action Day - October 15, 2008

October 15, 2008 has been selected as the 2008 Blog Action Day. This year's topic is poverty. Bloggers of all topics are invited to participate with blog posts related to their topic. The goal of the day is to raise an awareness of the issue of poverty. I plan to blog on some issue of poverty in family history. Many other family history and genealogy bloggers will also be participating. I think it would also be great for many of my book blogger friends who read this to participate. I can think of so many great books which have a poverty theme--both fiction and non-fiction. You can register your blog, podcast, or vlog for participation. You have almost 2 months to come up with a post!

Internet Explorer Doesn't Like Blogger/Blogspot

There seems to be a problem with using Internet Explorer to try to view blogs hosted at blogspot.com. If you can read this, you are probably using Firefox, Safari, or Opera as your browser. I first encountered the problem last night. At that time, it wasn't affecting all the blogs at blogspot, but today there are more blogs that I'm unable to access. I do hope that IE gets the problem ironed out, but in the meantime, I hope that a few of you who are at WordPress or on your own server will encourage people to download Firefox at http://www.mozilla.com/.

Update: It appears that the conflict is between SiteMeter, a tool that many of us use to get statistics about visitors, and IE7. Switching to Firefox as your browser solves the problem! I'm checking for options other than losing those stats by removing the counter because SiteMeter provides a set of stats that isn't available via Google Analytics.

Update 2: I'm told that this fix found at Little Green Footballs in the comments works for people browsing:

QUICK FIX! QUICK FIX! QUICK FIX!

If you're suffering these problems in IE7, add "*.sitemeter.com" to your list of restricted sites. That will force IE to reject the bad code. I was having the same problems and now they're gone.

Procedure:

1. Open menu item: Tools...Options
2. Click "Security" tab
3. Select "Restricted Sites"
4. Click "Sites" button
5. Under "Add this website to this zone", enter "*.sitemeter.com" without the quotes
6. Click "Add" button
7. Close windows using "Close" or "OK", not "Cancel".

After that, and without a restart, Sitemeter's thwartage is thwarted!

Bloglines vs. Google Reader

I've been asked to comment on my switch to Google Reader from Bloglines and compare the two.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who provided the information on exporting my subscriptions from Bloglines so they could be imported quickly without having to enter each and every one!

Google Reader appears to be delivering all my feeds. I've pretty much quit using Bloglines. There are things I like better about Bloglines. I was able to use the keystroke S to navigate from one blog feed to the next quickly. It worked even between different feed categories so that I could click on the first feed in the first category and work my way down. With Google Reader, the S keystroke doesn't work. I can still use the J keystroke to navigate down blog feeds, but the quick keystroke appears to be gone--or I haven't found it yet. If you don't mind your feeds being all scrambled in the order of receipt, you can use the J keystroke all the way down through all feeds.

I no longer have to reload Janice's page when I click to read her blog. It works like a charm in Google Reader. All of Glenn's posts are being delivered. See my original post if you don't remember the context! I compared both blogs for awhile, and the only two I seemed to be having trouble with were these two.

Some feeds arrive faster via Bloglines; others arrive faster via Google Reader. I guess it ultimately depends on which reader you like best, and if all your feeds work with your reader. I'm still maintaining feeds at both locations, but I'm generally hitting the "mark all read" at Bloglines and reading things at Google Reader.

Imported

Thanks to several of you who pointed out that it's really quite simple to export Bloglines subscriptions and import them into Google Reader, I now have all my feeds at Google Reader. I haven't deleted them from Bloglines yet, but I'm looking forward to checking out how well all the feeds work!

On Blog Aggregators/Readers

I set up my blog feeds in Bloglines a long time ago. I've stuck to it for a long time, but I'm debating switching to Google Reader for everything. I have two "problematic" blog feeds in Google Reader now. For some reason, when I click through from Bloglines to one of Janice's posts, I get an "HTTP 403 Forbidden" message and then have to reload the page. That works, but it gets tiresom, so I've set her up through Google Reader. My other problematic blog feed from Bloglines is the well-known Knoxville blogger Glenn Reynolds known as Instapundit. About a month ago, I started getting only one to three posts a day through the feed at Bloglines. I get them all using Google Reader. It makes me wonder how many other posts I'm missing with Bloglines. It won't be fun adding all the feeds, but once it gets done. I've resisted making a complete switch, but I may make the switch gradually as I have time. By the way, I've emailed the problem with Glenn's blog to Bloglines, but they've not responded with a solution. Do they even read their comments? Can you tell that I'm growing increasingly frustrated?

Partial vs. Full Feeds

I'm a blog reader who reads my feeds through an RSS reader. I definitely prefer feeds that are full. Plagiarism Today has an article that talks about full vs. partial feeds and concludes that "there is little business justification for keeping your feeds partial" and that "if you are running a partial feed and are considering the switch, there are ways to provide better security for your feed." It's a thought-provoking article.

Top 100 Breaking News Blogs

Carnegie Mellon did a study. Instapundit came out on top.

Genealogical Discussion at ACL

On Thursday at lunch, several ACL members who were pursuing their own genealogy or helping library researchers with theirs met. A quick round-up of some of the resources mentioned at our roundtable discussion.

Must-Have Books for Identifying Records
The Handybook for Genealogists, 11th ed. (Everton, 2005)
Redbook: American State, County, and Town Sources, 3rd ed. (Ancestry, 2004)

For Native American Research
Lennon, Rachel Mills. Tracing Ancestors Among the Five Civilized Tribes: Southeastern Indians Prior to Removal. (Genealogical, 2002)

Paid Databases
Ancestry.com
Footnote.com

Blogs
Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter
GenealogyBlog.com

Ordering Pension Files from National Archives