Sorry if it bothers anyone to read about stuff that has nothing to do with politics, but I thought some folks might find this interesting, or even useful, especially if they read this site a lot.

If you're a news junkie like me and you've never heard of Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, you're missing out.  It's essentially a system that lets websites publish their stories in a standardized format so that readers can easily check what's new on their favorite sites  from a program that's similar to an email client.  RSS saves me a boatload of time when satisfying my addiction, because I don't need to load a whole website to see whether there are new stories available -- I can skim story titles and summaries very quickly and if I want to see the full story it's just a click away.  You can even get a beep when there's a new article to read.   If you browse the web on a PDA or phone RSS is just about the only way to get by withot going insane from the wait and/or being robbed blind by data overage fees,

MyDD makes use of RSS, even though as far as I can tell there aren't any links to the feeds anywhere on the site.  This is a shame, but some googling reveals that the main feed is located at: http://www.mydd.com/rss/index.rdf

and the diaries feed is at: http://www.mydd.com/rss/diary.rdf

Instructions for using these feeds are available all over the place, but if anyone has questions, feel free to ask in the comments.  If you need a good web based client, I use both Google Reader(which is more like a dedicated program) and iGoogle(a portal, it only shows story titles, so you can fit more feeds on a page), Either one should provide a pleasant introduction to this essential tool which makes using the internet a lot easier.