Trackback and pingback Feb 10, 2006
I just learned the difference between a trackback and a pingback: 

A trackback is a small message sent from Site A to Site B to notify Site B that Site A wants to reference a post on Site B and provide a way for Site B to link back to Site A's reference.  That's a very complicated way of saying a pretty simple thing.  There's usually a textbox in the post-writing section of a website to paste trackback links. 

A pingback is the same thing, except that it's done automatically by pasting a link in the post content.  So instead of pasting the trackback link in a separate textbox, the trackback is sent directly from the content textarea.  For example, if the sites referenced above could accept trackbacks, they would receive a trackback from this post because it links to them. #technology
WordPress RSS feeds Feb 10, 2006
My site is powered by WordPress, which has functions that automatically output several different RSS feeds.  An RSS feed essentially allows a person to read the posts on my site without actually visiting my site.  Using an RSS reader (written about here and here), a person can view content from several different websites all in one place, without actually visiting any of those sites.  This saves time and generally makes things more convenient. 

WordPress automatically generates several different feeds:  RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, RSS 0.92, and Atom.  These formats are all essentially the same, though they have slight differences.  The differences are sort of like the differences between Microsoft Word 97 and Word XP.  They're not that big of a deal, but if you had the choice, you'd probably go with Word XP.  With that in mind, I'd recommend using Atom, followed by RSS 2.0.  These are the most recent in terms of development, and Atom is the only format that's still in development.  This means that there will probably be an Atom 2.0 sometime in the future, but that's not something you need to worry about.  RSS 2.0 is copyrighted by Harvard and its development is frozen.  More info about the differences between these two formats can be found here. 

In addition to these site feeds, WordPress also generates several more specific feeds.  Each individual post has its own feed, which basically tells a reader when the post receives new comments.  For example, my "Intolerance of lactose" post (which had a surprisingly large number of comments) has it's own feed.  There's also a feed for all comments on all posts, which was recently updated and written about here.  There are also feeds for each category (such as the food category) and each page (such as the about page).  The bottom line is that WordPress generates an obscene number of feeds which have little to no actual purpose. #technology
RSS relative URLs Feb 10, 2006
I recently noticed that my RSS feeds weren't displaying links properly because I often use relative links (/address instead of http://domain.com/address).  I searched and found a WordPress support topic that linked to Robert Accettura's AbsoluteRSS plugin.  That fixed it.  It basically just adds the site url to relative links, but it only affects the feeds, not the actual posts.  It currently doesn't deal with relative links that have ./ or ../, but I don't care because I don't use them. #technology
Normalcy Feb 10, 2006
Wow, another politics post!  Actually, this is hardly related to politics.  Don't worry. 

Warren G. Harding ran for president in 1920 with the slogan, "A Return to Normalcy", which suggested returning to a normal state of affairs after World War I.  The word "normalcy" was met with criticism from a bunch of people because they thought he meant to use the word "normality", but used a made-up word instead (later referred to as a "Bushism").  My history teacher in high school, the infamous Lou Palazzi, referred to Harding as an idiot who made up a word and brought it into widespread use by putting it in his presidential slogan.  I've believed this lie for the past 8 years.  Whenever people use the word "normalcy" in a sentence, I'm tempted to (and sometimes actually do) point out their use of a made-up word. 

It was later found that "normalcy" was used as far back as 1857, but it had simply fallen out of use. 

Lesson learned:  Never trust a teacher.  Propagandists! #education