Well, the answer to my question about generating a second RSS feed for my site that's truncated seems to be that it's doable, but it would involve hacking some scripts (thanks for responding, Jon!). Writing that sentence is about as far as I'll get on that one because I don't know enough to be a hacker. At least, not on purpose. Accidentally is a whole other story, of course.

I was bemoaning this state of affairs, when Bitworking Joe wrote to tell me that he's solved the problem himself on the client side:

"Jenny is polling if she should produce two RSS feeds, one a headline only feed and the other with full content. I solved this problem a while ago with my skin for AmphetaDesk. Here are some screenshots of how it works, specifically with her news feed."

To which I say, BRAVO! If you view the screenshots, you'll see that his skin for AD displays a truncated version of the post by default, but that clicking on it will uncompress it to full length. This is an even better solution, although it is applicable to AmphetaDesk only at this point. I wonder if something similar could be done in Radio's news aggregator or a third-party version such as Marc Paschal's kit. Couldn't you use CSS and X-HTML to create divs and layers and such to produce the same effect? I sure wish I could program this stuff myself....

I've just finished reading Matt Trump's op/ed piece What Americans Think about Gasoline [via Doc Searls]. It's quite interesting and most likely true, but what caught my eye was the following paragraph at the bottom of the page.

"Your Blog Here: Send us your web log, and we may consider it for Foxnews.com's Blog of the Week. Some Guidelines: We don't want to hear about your cat or your favorite foods, but if you've got something different and interesting to say about the news, politics, culture, technology, science, education, etc., we'd like to hear from you. We're looking for new voices; if you're already pretty famous in or out of blogland, we'll probably pass. And we'll also probably pass if you're talking about the same big headlines and issues as everybody else. And the big rule: The e-mail must say "guest blog" in the subject line."

So here's your big chance, bloggers! Hey, what happens to the long bet if both Dave and Martin are right and blogs and professional journalists end up co-existing peacefully side-by-side? What if the top five stories are covered by newspapers and bloggers? That's my bet.

I'm very impressed with all of the new toys on Raelity Bytes. On the right-hand side, check out the What's Related section that uses the new Google API to find similar pages, the list of Amazon's top books, and the list of Amazon's top titles for "Apples." I'll have to try to add the related box to my site one of these days. Has anyone seen that spare time I lost? (Thanks to Will for pointing this out.)