I've been fiddling around with a few popular blog tools of late and the results have been instructive and appealing. RSS Feeds are something I had heard of, and I knew many blogs and websites use it as an easy method of announcing changes to their content. Knowing that my comments-provider, YACCS also provides a feed that lets me know when new comments have been posted prompted me to plunge into a few feeds. Taking a few tips from veteran feeder George, I discarded his earlier pick Amphetadesk in favour of his current favourite FeedReader, which has an interface similar to news-clients that we're so used to. I've slowly been adding a few feeds of my own: the list now includes Yaccs comments for my blog, NYT, BBC, Slashdot, India News and Crickets. I had to push the update intervals to a longer period after I realised the updates were getting too much attention from me!

Part two was installing Movable Type and setting up a small blog of my own. Amit first pointed me towards Movable Type as a clean way of blogging with a great deal of control. I decided to set up a little internal-to-Persistent blog as I can set it all up on my machine.Since I don't have space to host it on the Web, it can't be seen by outsiders, but if anyone from Persistent is reading this and wouldn't mind a dekko, let me know and I'll send you the url. This blog is called Perspiring Pistons (a hark back to this), a tribute to my constant exhortations to my colleagues to turn the AC settings away from Cold and well, to the up-and-down cycles of work!

There's still a long way to go in terms of it settling down, but so far MT has made it very easy to use. The blog is meant to be rather lightweight in content, with emphasis on recent on-goings in my immediate workplace.