Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Practice tonight – dress warmly! Also, notice of site updates

Tonight’s practice seems like a milder version of our game

Saint Paul Weather Forecasts on Yahoo! Weather

Tonight: Cloudy with a few showers. Low near 55F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.

We all know now (I’ve learned my lesson) to have rain jackets, two layers of shirt (long sleeved and short sleeved), etc. A pair of lightweight cotton/wool gloves and/or batting gloves can help too.

I doubt we’ll cancel practice but if we do I’ll update here and send email.

I was asked about getting email notifications when this page changes. The service we’re using for this blog (Google’s Blogger) doesn’t provide email notification of changes. Instead it handles notifications through a “feed” which is consumed by a “feed reader”.

Feed readers are newer tools, mostly used by geeks like me. There are services that will send you email whenever a page changes. I’ve used www.changedetection.com/monitor.html. If you give them the address of http://hgrabaseball.blogspot.com/ and your email you’ll get emailed with every change to this page, including new or revised articles.

In terms of feed readers, I use bloglines as my personal feed reader, Google Reader is also popular. These are web-based “feed readers”.

In addition to these web based solutions, the latest version of OS X Mail.app (10.5.3) will handle feed changes as though they were email; Outlook 2007 will do this as well. Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, and Safari 3 will all track feeds and notify users of changes. IE does the nicest job of this set. See the application help files for more information.

For major things, like a game or practice cancellation, I do send out an email to every Bandit address I know of.