Regular baseball coverage will resume at 9 a.m., but we’d like to take a second to point out the many ways you can follow RAB throughout the 2009 baseball season. Specifically, we’re going to pimp our RSS feed, Facebook page, and Twitter feed.
RSS feed
If you use RSS feeds, hopefully you’ve already subscribed to RAB. If not, you could do that right now. Click the Feedburner icon in the right sidebar and you’re set.
For those who don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask. To use RSS, you need an RSS reader like Google Reader. Instead of visiting your favorite sites individually multiple times per day, you subscribe to their feeds and the information comes to you. For a much more comprehensive overview of RSS, including links to a number of RSS readers, check out this site.
In case you need convincing, I present an IM Mike sent me in January:
Michael: i did something over the weekend that changed my life
i started using an RSS reader
it’s wonderful, everything comes to me
Do you really need any more convincing than that? Subscribe to our feed today. If you don’t, you’d better dead or in jail. And if you’re in jail, BREAK OUT!
For the longest time I tried to ignore Twitter’s existence, but eventually it became too powerful. It’s this really annoying Web service where you send “tweets” to your “followers.” Then they can respond to your tweets, and everyone can see. Essentially, these are pubic mass emails, limited in size to 140 characters.
(Aside: One might think that William Strunk would approve of Twitter for the brevity it enforces. Alas, instead of omitting needless words Twitterers regularly omit “needless” characters and replace others with phonetic truncations. I weep for our language. Keith Law knows what I’m talking about.)
If you’re on Twitter, you can follow @riveaveblues. I swear, we don’t tweet our every post. That’s annoying. In fact, we hardly tweet any of our posts. It’s mainly just banter with the readers.
If you’re not on Twitter, I salute you.
Every so often I check the RAB Facebook page and see who has become a fan recently. Not that I’d recognize any of the names — though seeing my little brother had joined without my prompting him was pretty cool. Anyway, this is the most neglected of our social media presences, but we promise we’ll work on it. Follow us, though. It’ll give us more motivation to better utilize it.
That wasn’t that bad, was it? Cool. The baseball talk will be back any minute now.