RSS & Free Republic

If you aren't familiar with the technology, RSS is a method for news & opinion sites (such as this one) to publish an index of new topics in XML such that visitors to the site can get regular updates using a news aggregator client (such as 'Feedreader').

The benefit to the user is that they don't need to continually refresh their browser because the reader just checks the index every couple minutes and lets the user know if any new topics exist. They can stay on top of hundreds of sites without any effort and can instantly go to a site that has new content of interest to them.

The advantage to the hosts is that their web servers aren't bogged down by hundreds of refreshes every minute as countless bytes are sent down to the browsers of users the majority of which is then ignored. Using RSS, a visitor to FreeRepublic only requests a full article after they have already seen the topic in the index and have an interest in it. This is way more efficient than sending all the current content to the browser on each refresh even if it is identical to the content they got the last time they refreshed.

I do. The fact is, thousands of the established sites that operate as ongoing logs of the days news (Slashdot for instance) already support this. It wouldn't be difficult to generate the RSS content from the HTML already produced by FR and the result would be less demand on bandwidth for the site.

The other attraction is that one you are 'syndicated', other sites can host a portion of your content (only teasers really) and anyone interested in the full text will be redirected to FR automatically. One such site is:

http://www.newsisfree.com/

>>what html code do i use to align rows of pictures, side by side with a small space between the two?

(whoa!! my private reply to you was ugly... I guess freepmail cant be formatted the same way as a post... here is my reply to you again, but POSTED so the formatting comes out as planned.)

Sometimes you can just add one or more...
  between pictures to space them. that stands for non-breaking-space.
<image1> <image2> ... would space the two images (or for that matter words) one blankspace apart.
<image1>   <image2> ... would space the two images 3 blankspaces apart.
here is word1 word2 spaced 11 blankspaces apart, by using   just 5 times.

And also remember to use
<br clear=all> when you want an absolute carriage return with no photos still lingering from above.

Also check out my post at http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1062358/posts?page=12#12
That one seemed to use only 4 photos, but actually used a additional 5th photo, a 10x10 block of 'white', that I stretched to whatever size I happened to need to make things line up correctly. Most people use a 1x1 'transparent' photo called spacer.gif, and they stretch that one to create space.

Here are examples using just photos of solid colors that are 10x10 pixels each. You probably cant see the 'white' one, between green and blue...

Here is roughly what I did in that post I mentioned...

<img
src=http://gallery.cybertarp.com/albums/userpics/11602/10square_FF0000.jpg
width=100 height=55><img
src=http://gallery.cybertarp.com/albums/userpics/11602/10square_0000FF.jpg
width=100 height=55>
<br clear=all>
<img
src=http://gallery.cybertarp.com/albums/userpics/11602/10square_FFFFFF.jpg
width=15 height=55><img
src=http://gallery.cybertarp.com/albums/userpics/11602/10square_FFFF00.jpg
width=70 height=55><img
src=http://gallery.cybertarp.com/albums/userpics/11602/10square_FFFFFF.jpg
width=40 height=55><img
src=http://gallery.cybertarp.com/albums/userpics/11602/10square_00CC00.jpg
width=50 height=55>

and heres what that looks like...

...here it is with align=left inside every img tag

...here it is with align=right inside every img tag

here is graphical data created by stretching photos

...good luck!
FLE

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