Photo updates (and RSS feed)

I’ll bet you didn’t know that our photo gallery had its own RSS feeds.  Actually, you can be excused, because for a while the feeds disappeared.  I went looking for them today, and discovered they were missing, and reactivated them.

I’ve updated the Recent shots… album with pictures from Taxco, a nearby trout farm, and more.  Here are the most recent photos that are in the album (brought to you by the wonders of the RSS news feed):

Each album has its own RSS feed.  To find it, go to the album you want, then look to the left of the page.  What most people will want is the newest photos, so to find those use this news feed
You should already know that Finding direction has its own news feed, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/findingdirection.  And if you’re a real CottrillCompass.com fanatic, I created a MASTER feed that will show the latest entries in both the photo gallery AND Finding direction:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CottrillCompass-dot-com
Don’t even know what an RSS feed is?  An RSS feed is a specially formatted feed that updates whenever something at the source it’s updated.  It’s read by news reading programs.  It’s a way to always keep up to date with the latest.  Some programs that read news feeds include:

• GreatNews (I use this a lot)
• Thunderbird
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer

And of course online services like:

• Google Reader
• My Yahoo!
• BlogLines

One more thing, and this is really nifty.  You can use Google Photos Screensaver to automatically add our most recent photos to your screensaver!  I had a little trouble getting this to work with the normal album screensavers, so just to make things more complicated, I made a new feed just for use in the Google Photos Screensaver.  Use this one:

Feed for Google Photo Screensaver
The screensaver will show the latest 50 photos (I think!), along with the titles.  You can click a link to go directly to the photo online to read the description.

Now you have more information than you ever wanted.  But if you want to learn more about news or web feeds, check out this article on Wikipedia.