it’s hard to believe that i’ve been running this site in its current form for 3 years now. i just now looked back at the first post and realized that i’d written it 3 years ago yesterday. it reminded me of one of the reasons why i started blogging – to evangelize technology solutions to other Sigma webmasters and hope to create various web goodies you can use on your sites.
the first thing i did when i was asked to be a supporting officer was to establish my identity online. i went out and found pockets of active Sigma communities and i started participating, posting, introducing myself and so on getting my name out to get an idea of who’s who in Sigma online. it was then that i realized that the national site was missing out on a huge opportunity in not hosting its own social network and driving all that activity to pbs1914.org.
that got me doing some better things with this site. the idea was to start blogging on interesting technologies i came across that i thought had some remotely useful functionality to the national site. it would be a two-way communication (imagine that!) between myself and anyone who wanted to give feedback. and it’d give me a testing ground to prove the usefulness of anything by running it on my own.
fast forward 3 years later and much has changed, but my point today is i never really highlighted any of the things i toyed around with that any Sigma webmaster could take to their site. this new technology series will focus on just that – a bunch of free modules you can freely take to your site where you get the free benefits of the updating we do at bluephi.net. did i mention it’s free?
today’s highlight is my RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. every content site out there today provides an RSS feed. it’s a standardized format for taking content from one site and making it available for use on another site. it’s a subscription model where, for example, your chapter site would subscribe to the bluephi.net RSS feed and any new posts we make magically appear on your chapter site. instant content refreshes with very little effort. i know quite a few of you have added my feed to your favorite RSS reader and some have even plugged the feed right into their site. if you’re looking to give reasons for brothers to frequent your site, regular updates are a must and this is an easy way to get it.