And Now, the Secret RSS Link for CNCCookbook

I will tell you the secret link…

I’ve had a lot of requests over the last year for an RSS feed for CNCCookbook. What many don’t realize is the ‘Cookbook reads like a blog, but I’m not using any blog software like WordPress to produce it. Each page is hand crafted in Dreamweaver. I’ve got a set of templates that make the process nearly as easy as using a blog, but alas, no RSS feeds. The answer is I need to switchover to some real blog software. Given the amount of content on CNCCookbook, that’s not easy. For example, CNCCookbook has not quite 500 pages. Moreover, there are tons of links to our pages that we don’t want to disrupt. There are well over 12,000 pages that link to our home page here alone!

Fortunately, it’s simply a matter of programming to fix it, so I’ve been quietly building up an alternative. I will take the opportunity to do a mild site redesign as well since it has been years since I’ve revisited the site’s graphical design. Consider all that fair warning that changes are afoot, but they won’t be immediate changes and hopefully they’ll be very much for the better. I am hoping to be all done with it by mid-2011. Working on changing the look and feel of the site is not my highest priority–providing new and better content as well as working on our G-Wizard software are the priorities.

But the first step was to get this page over into some blog software, and then run with the two in parallel. I’ve accomplished that, so you can access the blog page directly to get an RSS feed. If you prefer to simply visit this page periodically as so many of you have been doing, that’s fine too. I will continue the two in parallel until I can make the blog appear under this URL, and then we’ll merge the two. Hopefully neither the RSS readers nor the page visitors will notice any bumps when that happens!

If you want to share links or bookmarks, you’re much better off to use the links from the “natural” www.cnccookbook.com web site. Those are the URL’s that will be preserved for posterity. Consider the blog form under cnccookbook.wordpress.com to be a temporary experiment that goes away when it can be merged with this page. It’s pretty easy to tell which one you are on because they look so different.

Drop me a note and let me know what you think about it all.

Postscript:  We decommissioned the old cnccookbook.wordpress.com blog and went to a WordPress blog that’s fully integrated with the overall site.  Much better, no?

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2 Comments

• 
  Andy Tibbetts 2010/12/29 at 11:25 pm

  I like the WordPress Blog features. I’ve been using it about 6 months on my site. I don’t envy you the challenge of getting your old post on here and sorted but I think once it is done you’ll appreciate the ease of adding a new post. Which will hopefully mean more post : )

  Keep up the awesome work, you’re are teaching thousands of people with every picture, story, and review that you link us too.

  Thank you,

  Andy

  Reply
• 
  Andy Tibbetts 2010/12/29 at 11:25 pm

  I like the WordPress Blog features. I’ve been using it about 6 months on my site. I don’t envy you the challenge of getting your old post on here and sorted but I think once it is done you’ll appreciate the ease of adding a new post. Which will hopefully mean more post : )

  Keep up the awesome work, you’re are teaching thousands of people with every picture, story, and review that you link us too.

  Thank you,

  Andy

  Reply