Oliver Drobnik

I did it!

sms.at won a second place price for it’s sms.at blogs. It’s a great thing for them to have thousands of users create free content. Users can post via the web, by sending an SMS or MMS. In the latter case even the MMS pictures are posted to the blog. The one thing I am dearly missing is access to RSS streams to subscribe to. Currently and probably for quite a while you can only subscribe to get e-mail updates daily or weekly.

You can read this, because I now successfully put my blog engine onto the live site. It took me a while to figure out that VS.NET 2002 does not automatically send the credentials needed to get past a company firewall. You have to use this code below to make it do that:

Dim svc As New localhost.Weblog()
Dim myProxy As New System.Net.WebProxy("http://myproxy:8080", True)
svc.Proxy = myProxy
svc.Proxy.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials

The regular visitor might have noticed that the design of my personal homepage has changed. But true beauty is hidden to the eye … behind the scenes this site is now driven by RSS.

“RSS what?!” you might ask

RSS is a standard that was once invented by Netscape (Rich Site Summary) but soon got reused worldwide to provide a simple way of syndicating news items (Real Simple Syndication). Basically everyone with a website can take part in this adventure provided he has an RSS generator. There are services that will host your RSS feed for you like e.g. Radio Userland or if you own a website you can put it there.

The audience then can subscribe to the RSS feed and thus get news items from the author without having to visit the site.

Magic: The Gathering Pre-Release Tournament at Magic Corner.