I suppose this is one of those things that if you have to ask, we know your answer? WTF is an RSS feed? Why would it be just comments, and not include original blogs by p6?

I do like the "Live discussions" sidebar; it concisely points to where the action is.

I suppose this is one of those things that if you have to ask, we know your answer?

Yeah.

RSS feeds are a way of reading (or at least finding out about) articles in automated fashion. P6, for instance, publishes a feed that is essentially the unformatted front page, with links to the full post embedded.

You read the feeds with (you guessed it) an RSS reader. I use Feed Demon, which is commercial and the best Windows reader I had found (I haven't tried the one built into Firebird yet). A major function of RSS readers is to go get the feeds you tell it to on a scheduled basis. There is no other way to keep up with all the sites I follow regularly, much less those non-daily reads.

I've always had a "live discussions" box since my first Movable Type site. MT makes such a list blindingly simple to add. For Drupal I had to write a module to produce it. I prefer it to the comment list that, say, Blogcritics has, listing each comment instead of the threads themselves (which Drupal lets you do via two checkboxes). It lets discussions stay live as long as they continue instead of getting lost when the original post scrolls off the first page.

Ah. So it's for people who participate in or at least scan dozens of blogs per day looking for whatever they hope to find.

Yet another concept to digest.

not to change the subject... but when I posted my original comment I got an error report in the top box. Everything seemed to work ok, but some database insert had failed because some field which needed to be unique was being duplicated. I wondered if "contact p6" was a reasonable reaction, supplying a screen text cut. I decided not, since everything was functioning ok...the error probably got logged somewhere anyway ...

Also, under "The Best of P6", about half the links seem broken.

And now I appreciate Live Discussion even more. It works so well that it seems obvious how it should work.

I think I know what the error message was. Obviously non-fatal but I wasn't aware it was visible outside the error log. And yeah, I've let the siderbar fall all to hell. I need to do something about that.

Some general comments regarding the site.

I went to read "installing a negro in your head", thanks for fixing the link. I'll hand it to you p6, you're a good read.

I see one can't post comments regarding the "best of" series. I can see why you might or might not want such comments to join the permanent posting itself, but a classic posting might generate a classic comment on occasion, eh?

Lastly, I see where the school discussion is linked from the best of series. Cool. So I went back and read my first comment of that series. I see several things I would at least say differently, and a couple I would analyze differently. I'm not sure what I hoped for in detail when I first was attracted to the "black man reading newspaper" clipart, but such a result is rewarding for me. I'm better at this topic now than I was before you.

There's a satire in five parts on my Niggerati.net blog. You might find it amusing. Might not. I've gotten a wide range of reactions.

On the comments, those are the original posts, tied together by a linked list. Since all the comments close in a month, that's that…I'd have to modify one of the tables underlying the site to make exceptions and come up with an administrative interface that makes sense.

And the education discussion really was a good one. Given our respective political positions, I'm not sure it's a Good Thing that you're better at this now. But I'll tell you the truth: If you're seriously considering how to improve education for Black youth (though I really dislike your approach, given your background it's possible to come to it in good faith) a real effort to put your ideas across differently would get you more useful conversation, and not just here.