Until this year, I was not a reader – at all, not even a little bit. Then my husband brought home a book about Feng Shui from his mother’s bookshelf and I read it cover to cover. Then I read another book about Feng Shui. I guess I just needed to find a topic that interested me. Now I keep finding more books that I want to read, about all kinds of different subjects, and now I understand why avid readers always have a stack of books by their beds and a list of books they want to pick up. It’s kind of addicting!

As an Administrative Professional, I need to have stellar written and verbal communication skills. While blogging is more of a personal form of writing than professional or business correspondence, it is good practice for organizing my ideas into complete thoughts. Thus, the reason I joined the 2011 WordCount Blogathon. I figure, if I write something every day for 31 days, that will definitely give me some practice.

The Blogathon is offering a few prompts this year and today’s topic is “My Top 5 Favorite Books on Writing.” The following are my top five.

1. The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging by the Editors of the Huffington Post
2. ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse
3. 31 Days to Build a Better Blog also by Darren Rowse
4. The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing by Rise B. Axelrod
5. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey*

* This book isn’t specifically about writing, but it is great for learning how to set goals, prioritize your time and gain balance between your personal and professional life. I recommend it to everyone because you can apply these principles to every aspect of your life.

RSS is an acronym that stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” By definition, to syndicate means “to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places.”

In the media world you’ll hear of a syndicated TV or radio show, meaning that it is broadcast across multiple stations around the country. In the Web world, syndication is usually mentioned in conjunction with “feeds,” as in RSS feeds.

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is basically a stream of new headlines or postings from a website which has been organized so that your computer can fetch the latest info and bring it to you.

Do you have “breaking news” alerts that come to your inbox from your local newspaper or news station? Well, that’s pretty much an RSS feed.

People have been adding new info to their websites all along, but with RSS feeds you no longer have to login to the New York Times website every day to check the headlines – they will come directly (and automatically) to you. Plus, you can choose the type of news you want to receive (sports, world news, classifieds, etc.).

How do I use an RSS feed?

You’ll need to choose a “feed reader” which will be the place where the new headlines are collected from the websites of your choice. There are web-based (online) feed readers and software-based feed readers. With a web-based feed reader you can get your news from any computer, anywhere. Software-based readers, like Outlook, require software to be installed on each computer.

Netvibes, Google Reader, and Internet Explorer (which has a feed reader built in) are web-based readers. Microsoft Outlook 2007 has RSS reading capabilities, which makes it a software-based feed reader. If you have a smart phone or a laptop Outlook could work fine for you. My personal favorite is Google Reader, because I love everything Google.

Then, go to a website and look for a link to their RSS feed or the universal RSS symbol (left). Sometimes it’s listed prominently at the top of the page and sometimes it’s at the bottom in the footer, like on the New York Times’ page. Click on the link to subscribe to their RSS feed, choose which categories if applicable, and then choose your method of delivery (web-based feed reader, software-based feed reader or email subscription).

Check out this video for a quick lesson on RSS and then Subscribe to GeorgiaFogle.com to test what you’ve learned about RSS feeds!

I ran into this issue yesterday. I created an image which originally came from Adobe Illustrator and ended up in Adobe Photoshop. I saved the image as a JPG and uploaded it to a WordPress blog. When I sent the blog’s link to everyone I work with, I got a quick call from one of them stating the image didn’t appear for them.

Let the troubleshooting begin.

I quickly determined that the issue was with Internet Explorer, as the image showed up in Firefox and Chrome. So I did a Google search to see what documentation is out there.

Several places suggested it may be a permalink issue. I tried it just to make sure, but that was not the answer in this case.

Upon further searching I found the issue on the Microsoft Support page. These are all great suggestions, but still didn’t fix my problem.

So, back to the drawing board – the Photoshop drawing board. I thought maybe I should rename the file or try a different file format, that maybe WordPress was getting confused because I had uploaded several versions of the file to get it just right.

As I was re-saving the JPG image, I realized the error of my ways. The file was in CMYK color mode. D’oh! I changed it to RGB color mode, re-saved, re-uploaded and voila! Instant fix!

It’s like magic.

What tipped me off? When you do a “save as” in CMYK color mode you have far fewer file format options to choose from than RGB color mode. I noticed my list was much shorter and then checked how the mode was set. Hopefully this will be helpful if you ever encounter this issue.