What's all that stuff on the left sidebar?

For those of you who are new to weblogs (or, "blogs), here's a small bit of introduction.

Blogs represent a new type of web publishing venue. The interface is simple, the cost is minimal (free in this case), and the publishing is instantaneous! What's not to like?

Check the blogroll for links to other blogs that I thought might be of interest to our members.

One great thing about weblogs is that you can subscribe to them via an aggregator. The aggregator monitors "webfeeds" (also called RSS) so that you don't have to keep remembering to go back to the blog to see if anything's new. And if you use a web-based aggregator, such as Bloglines, you can even share your list of webfeeds. That's what we did over on the left.

Here's a link to a great introduction on weblogs and webfeeds.

If you have an aggregator, you can even subscribe to this weblog, using the little orange XML icon.