If any of you are regularly checking this page for changes, and would like an easier way to do that, you could consider learning how to subscribe.

If you are using Firefox, you’ll see a little orange icon at the far right of the address bar at the top of the screen (the next version of Internet Explorer, IE7, due out soon, will also have this, and Safari already does). If you click this icon, you can add a “live bookmark” (to the Bookmarks Toolbar, or just to the Bookmarks menu). Every 30 minutes, Firefox will check if there is any new material on the site, and if there is, it will be added to the bookmark. So, rather than loading the site, you can just check the bookmark.

You can do the same thing with just the photos from flickr (quite often we upload photos, which is a pretty automatic process, and don’t have a chance to write anything). If you go to the flickr page (click on any of the six thumbnails and then “olyvia.meyer’s photostream” on the right), you’ll see the same little orange icon in the address bar. Follow the same process (click on the icon), and you’ll have a “live bookmark” for the photos. The one catch with the photos is that often we don’t change the filename of the photo, so you’ll see things like “P9290115.jpg”, which doesn’t tell you much (but hopefully you can notice when there’s something new).

Quite a lot of websites have these feeds now, so you might want to use this technique elsewhere as well. If you find that you have a lot of “live bookmarks”, you might want to consider using something other than Firefox to manage them. You can download “newsreaders”, which are designed to work with these feeds (the process is much smoother than in Firefox), for example FeedReader, SharpReader or NewsFire.

An alternative for the really brave is to try out Flock, a Firefox-based web browser that provides a really good built-in news reader and image browser (I use it as my main browser). ScreenCastsOnline has a good introduction to Flock for those with good connections (it’s a 59MB movie, which will take forever to download with dial-up), or you can ask me if you want any help with it