I’ve found this nifty extension for FireFox called Sage that is essentially a little tiny feed reader. I’ve never messed with an aggregator before, because I figured the forum worked just fine on its own, but this seems to be working out fairly well. Anyone else use Sage or some other kind of reader?
Sage rocks. I’ve been using it for months. I’ve tried others, but Sage is the best I’ve come across.
Raise your hand if, when you saw this thread, you thought “Rosemary and Thyme”!
I think that was the intent. 
No, but tell her to find me an acre of land…
tiny feed reader…aggregator…
I’d say please translate to English but they are English words…I haven’t the faintest idea what you guys are talking about.
See:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
C&F has an RSS feed (that’s what this image at the bottom means:
)
which can be read by an RSS aggregator like, say, Sage.
I can’t find a link to download Sage. Can someone help me? Help me. Please.
Okay! I might like this! 
Verily!
Okay, I’m trying this out just for fun. I can see the usefulness of it, though it takes a little getting used to…but being able to quickly switch around the different feeds is pretty cool.
Can someone briefly explain what the “Technorati Trackback” is supposed to accomplish? Is it just an ego trip for bloggers, or does it serve a practical purpose? Just curious.
What does it do?
Technorati tags help to search blogs (very useful), and technorati ratings give you give a reputational system for blogs.
Okay. I read the link. I still don’t have the faintest idea what you folks are talking about. In simple (read: computer-illiterate) language, what does it do? What’s the purpose, the point?
Susan
The simplest way I can think to put it is that what you see on your screen is mostly the work of your browser, not the source site. The source site may supply instructions, but your browser does most of the work.
For things like forums and blogs, which are largely long chains of related text entries, the RSS and RDF formats allow the source site to send lots of data with minimal instructions in a very short time. Browsers that can handle these formats then figure out which chunk of data goes with which thread and prepares the information to paste on your screen.
Tools like Sage come from people who are dissatisfied with how browsers handle some types of data. Browsers usually work to the lowest common denominator, re-using the same toolsets as much as possible, so that they can work with most types of data. A specialized reader like Sage works only with certain specific types of data, but has more capabilities for that restricted dataset.
Hope that’s a bit clearer,
djm
Well, that helped some, djm. Continuation of dumb questions, though: Does that mean that people with Sage actually see something different on their screen when they look at C&F or is it just an internal how-the-computer-handles-it thing?
Susan
It is an alternative way of viewing the board as a whole, or a forum, or a thread.
The presentation and interface are much different, the content of the posts is the same.
Unless you view it backwards. Then it’s all about devil worship.
That has graphics in every post, but without the graphics, that’s about what the chiffboard looks like. In the sidebar on the left are a list of feeder sites, on the left bottom are the posts on the feeder side you’ve selecetd. You can see everything at a glance and click from site to site really quickly without waiting for banners etc. to load.
Edit: you can also look here: http://sage.mozdev.org/styles/
Under “feed preview” you see, um… a feed preview. Imagine that across the top in the preview window it says “Chiff & Fipple: The Chiff & Fipple Poststructural Pub: Parsley, Sage…” (Board: forum: thread) and that the smaller boxes below are the posts. (I don’t usually use Sage to read the chiffboard, though. I use it for blgs.)