Improvements to the Knockout Pages

If you've looked at the Knockout Draw pages on the website in the last couple of days, you'll notice some cosmetic and navigation changes which we hope will make those pages look and feel better. As always, if you disagree or have any suggestions then leave a comment or email me.

One addition which I especially want to highlight is the introduction of an RSS feed. If you look at the top of the right-hand menu you'll see an orange icon.



This is a link to an RSS feed containing all the knockout draws. If you open this in your feed reader (see this blog if you don't know what I'm talking about) you'll initially have over a hundred draws appear, but in future you'll receive prompt updates whenever we make a new one. Doing this means you won't have to check back continually for any new draws; you can instead sit back and wait to be notified automatically!

As this is a relatively new feature, there may be some teething problems so I'd be interested to hear if anybody has any difficulties getting it to work.

Introduction to Feeds

WARNING! Moderately technical computer stuff follows!

You may have noticed that the EBU has gone a little blog happy lately. There are more to come, too, and it might become harder to effortlessly keep up with everything. A lot of the items that appear in the blogs will be highlighted on the EBU front page of course, but not everything, and if you don't check in for a few days you might miss something. You can keep up by visiting every blog on a regular basis but that would soon become boring.

The solution is to make use of the automatic feeds that come from the blogs and which get updated whenever a new post gets made. A feed is just a stream of information and a feed reader can keep tabs on these streams and let you know when any of them change. This is not as complicated as it might sound and in fact you all probably have feed reader functionality in your browser right now. For instance, if you're using Internet Explorer 7 you can click on the orange feed icon to subscribe to a feed:

The feed will then appear in your list of favourites and will be highlighted when something new is available. Similar things can be done for Firefox, Opera, Safari and lots of other browsers. Alternatively, you can use a feed reader program to do this outside of your browser and there are lots of good ones out there. This Wikipedia article tells you all you need to know. In this way you can keep up to date with the blogs you're interested in without having to check back every day yourself.

Feeds are very useful and we intend to use them a lot more in the future so this is something that is worth discovering, if you haven't done so already.