Feeding Blogger into Joomla. Atom to Rss

If you have tried to feed your Google Blog (Blogger) into Joomla you would have noticed Google gives you an Atom xml link while Joomla uses RSS feed. There are a lot of complicated conversion tools out there (which this simple mind finds hard to comprehend) to convert Atom to RSS and some are for commercial use where they plug in their ads or you pay a fee. I finally found the best one that met my need and was very simple to use plus it was free. The Feed Normalizer seems to solve my problem very easily and I was able to use the link they generated into Joomla. Hope this helps anyone trying to solve the same problem I had.

Disc Golf

I have recently been introducing my friends to the wonderful world of disc golf (frisbee golf). If you have never done this before give it a try. Out here in central pa we have 3 courses I know of, these are in Gifford Pinchot state park in Lewisberry, D. F. Buchmiller park in Lancaster, and Codorus state park in Hanover. You may locate a disc golf course located near you here. If anyone wants to go, pm me at the cpaswing board. This game can be played in any weather! Really!

The nice thing about this sport is there is usually no fee to go out and play. Depending on the course you may or may not lose a disk but they are relatively cheap and I usually carry a few extras to play with anyway! There are many etiquettes like in any sport but the key is to have fun and feel free to ask some experienced player for game pointers and etiquette

Specialized discs for the sport are available at any Dicks sporting stores but you can start of with any frisbee to get a feel for it.

Geo Surfing

I dont know what it is about maps, but I cannot get enough of it. It is facinating to see where you live or lived, what is around you, or seeing places you plan to visit. What has makes it even better are the arieal photos or sattelite images. You might actually see your appartment or house, and if the images are recent and of high resolution you might even see your car parked outside. Sattelite images have existed for a while taken from landsat sattelites and arial photos and in the past these were availabe in Teraserver but now with Google Earth they have made "geo surfing" much easier and much more fun. With added terrain and other information overlays it is amazing how many places you can now discover all over the world (some areas have better resolution than others). To use google earth you will have to download an application and most computers shuold be able to handle this. Microsoft maps.live has recently taken geo surfing one step further by allowing you to actually navigate some big cities like Baltimore in 3D by allowing you to even turn corners in a street around building which look more realistic than goolge has. However if you dont have the latest and greatest computer dont even bother downloading their application (actually a plugin) it will hog your computer resources and if you dont have the right video card it will crash your machine (you will get the blue screen of death!). Since this is very new you might wait till they fix some of their bugs. For best geo surfing experience use a pc game pad!

Happy geo surfing!