I *like* it when technology works :-)

I host and maintain a website for a local non-profit organization. It's all volunteer so I like to keep the number of updates to the site on my servers to a minimum, if possible. When the members wanted a news feed, which implied a lot of updating on my part, my solution was to set up a blog for them for them on www.wordpress.com and then post the RSS feed back to the organization's web site. Gotta be easy, right? Well, actually, it is. Easy but not obvious, which is why I am posting how I did it here.

When I searched around for information on displaying RRS feeds, I found a lot of sites about RSS feed aggregators, hosted wordpress services and such, not exactly what I wanted to do. Some posts in forums I found even claim this can't be done. Not so, it can.

Wordpress offers you a URL like http://yourdomain,wordpress.com/feed that you can imbed in an iframe, which looks good in Internet Explorer, but not in FireFox, Chrome or Safari. After some additional surfing for best practices,I found the Google "Dynamic Feed Control Wizard - Put feeds on Your Web Page", here:

http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/wizards/dynamicfeed.html

A couple of clicks and your generate the codefor your web site using the AJAX Feed API. Cut and paste it into your 'news' page and your done. Any post to the wordpressblog shows up in the RSS feed window on your website. You can even customize the control further by reading the developer documentationand modifying the generated code. Saved by technology. cool.

Changing the program associated with .jar files on Windows Vista

Windows Vista Explorer, like XP before it, natively supports browsing .zip files, although for some reason known only to Microsoft, the' re called 'compressed folders'. There is a built-in or hard-coded file association between .zip files and a nonexistent program named 'CompressedFolders', and as a result this program does not appear in the list of Default Programs so you can configure addional associations. Why they made this a special case I don't know, but it makes it less than obvious when trying to associate the decompression and browsing functionality of Windows Explorer with .jar files.

The fix? Open a command window as administrator and run:

cmd /c assoc .jar=CompressedFolder

now all jar files can be exploded and browsed with Windows Explorer on the desktop.