No Helmuth book, eh? Guess I'm in the minority there as being a fan. Anyway, glad to see EW published that letter, I'm sure they got over a hundred of 'em!

What about your plans/ideas for WWDN that we are on tenderhooks for. I'm chewing my toes off in antici - pation.

Julian

Well, for my RSS reader, well... um... I use Mozilla FireFox/ThunderBird.

As for sports, I'm just glad to see the 'Hawks kicking butt and taking names (as they gave the 'Niners their first shut-out loss in 420 games!).

See Wil you're the voice of a generation, bud. Kinda heady.

I've been enjoying your column in Dungeon - keep up the good work. The art this time was a bit bizarre. For those that haven't seen it, it was Wil, bulging biceps straining to rip through Fantastic Four shirt. Oh yeah, and he was wearing a diaper.

Re: item the second

I just started using Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) to read RSS feeds, because I can use it from work. So far, no problems.

If only all P.R. connected to Leni Riefenstahl could go this well.

It's nice they were able to finally able to say something good about you. Still doesn't make them any less a bunch of gits.

I've also been fascinated with the Volcano-cam. It's awesome when a fly lands on the lens, looks like a Japanese SciFi monster movie come to life. Looking for some red flames shooting from the volcano, but hasn't happended yet.

Hm.. RSS reader?
Try www.bloglines.com I love it. Its an online RSS reader so it will run on Linux, not to mention any other OS with a Browser including Palm and PocketPC (there is a mobile version).

Is pretty full featured and is free!

The FireFox Live Bookmarks are pretty cool too.

I wish O&A weren't "premium" content as I would have liked to check them out.

I concur with Audrey. Bloglines.com is bad-ass... And the Bloglines notifier plugin for Mozilla/Firefox (to tell you when your RSS feeds have been updated) is SO kickass.

Another satisfied bloglines user here!

And a general comment, everything seems to be rockin' in the wheaton world these days and that is just woohoo cool. :)

For RSS, I use Feed On Feeds. http://sourceforge.net/projects/feedonfeeds/

It is a PHP/MySQL Server-Side RSS aggregator. It supports most RSS/Atom formats, and is pretty easy to install and use.

Another vote for Bloglines. Really good; I've had no problems with it in the 4 months I've used it.

It doesn't run on Linux, but I've been using an RSS-reader plugin for Trillian Pro to read RSS feeds. It works great because I've almost always got Trillian sitting there on the edge of my screen and it pops up little boxes in the corner when a new item appears on an RSS feed. The only problem with it is that it still only reads RSS 0.9 and not 1.0. I've been waiting for an update to the plugin forever, I should check again soon, it's been a while since the last time.

On a completely different note, I was really suprised that none of your items was about the X-Prize. :)

For RSS I use KNewsTicker, can be run either in its own window or as a panel applet. How lots of sites preconfigured, so its only a matter of ticking sites you want to monitor.

Did Opie & Anthony end up in CA? They used to be out of a local Boston station (WAAF) and were suddenly booted after starting some kick-ass mischeif (what else is new) and refusing to back off-- the start of WOW + others. This was 7 years ago, or something like that. Last I knew they were out of NYC area. Nice to know they still refuse to submit ;)

Regarding the RSS Aggregator question...

I've been using Bloglines for many months now. It's absolutely wonderful. You can check your RSS feeds ANYWHERE. The UI isn't completely straightforward, but all the features you want are there, somewhere.

My favorite Linux RSS reader is Straw:

http://www.nongnu.org/straw/

It's not perfect, but it was the first I used and I got used to it. Others prefer Liferea:

http://liferea.sourceforge.net/

but I prefer the space bar for "scroll/next new item", rather than Ctrl+N as in Liferea, so I can't bring myself to switch.

Try them both out, they are good and stable. In fact, I came to this post via Straw.

YABU - Yet Another Bloglines User. It's really great, because I can read my feeds at work or at home and not have to read 'repeats.' Also it has a handy blog page for me, so that I can do my own blog very simply (not great and not very customizable but it's so easy I just had to start one).

Oh, I forgot to say, both Straw and Liferea are available through Dag if you run FC2. It makes it easy to get through yum or apt.

Re: Item the Second

I use the Sage plugin for Firefox. I tried Thunderbird's built-in rss for a while, but finally decided to go back to Sage because I like seeing multiple articles onscreen at once.

If Carson doesn't make the average reader more money than Krieger, I'll eat a deck of of Kem cards.

You CANNOT be a true Dodger fan and even CONSIDER replacing Kirk Gibson as the facilitator of the Greatest Sports Moment Of All Time with a salami that merely clinched the division with games still in hand.

Gibson's jack WON that title in 1988. Hershiser was great too, yes, but you could have thrown the cast of The Facts Of Life for games 2-5 and the A's wouldn't have been able to come back from that emotional crash.

I moved on when Fox traded Piazza and I no longer knew who the team was, but I urge you to pay the proper respect to great memories. :)

Team in Training is a non-political group, and I think it is inappropriate for someone to conflate their political views with The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's work. OTOH, as a TNT veteran myself, I think it is great that you are using your personal influence with your friends and fans to raise awareness of the group.

Wil-

Red v. Blue? If the Red Sox and Dodgers meet in the World Series, we are SO GOING. I will find tickets somehow and I will laugh as Manny, Tek, and Ortiz go yard on your boys. ;-)

RSS Readers:
Another vote for KNewsTicker. I run the panel applet and watch for interesting headlines. All of the sites being monitored can also be tracked from the panel applet menu.

Other favorite reader is Sage for Mozilla Firefox. Links to a bookmark folder so all you have to do is right click the RSS, XML, or ATOM logo/link and throw it into the folder. Should work anywhere mozilla works.

I hate to point this out...but the Dodgers aren't going to the World Series. The Cards are going to eliminate them in the first round....So don't get your hopes up too high. LOL But it should be a good first round playoff, though. I expect some good games.

my favorite does not run on linux but it does run on the mac os (which i assume you run sometimes) which is omniweb. its a nice browser to boot.

I don't really understand how O&A got "the royal fucking shaft job". Don't get me wrong, I love em, but lets face it. First, they get fired for an april fools joke about the DEATH of the mayor in a terrible car crash, then after getting a second chance they get fired when some of their listeners have sex in a cathedral to win money from them.

-Brendan

I'm all for helping raise money for cancer patients, but it's hardly the fault of this (or any other) administration that a large percentage of Americans are without health insurance, and the number is certainly nowhere near forty percent.

Congrats on the EW "apology!"

For RSS I really like NetNewsWire ( http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ )

It's for OS X, but it's pretty slick.

RSS Readers: I've used Straw, which seems simple and adequate. ..the only thing is I have to load it up every time I use it (I'd rather have something continually on my desktop).

gdesklets has a sweet looking rss reader for your desktop. Made for Gnome but I run it nicely on xfce4. Seems to use a lot of resrouces, though.

This doesn't really have much to do with this post, but bear with me. My boyfriend came home with Guiness Saturday, and all I could say is, "That's what Wil Wheaton drinks!" Dorky, I know. I saw the word Guiness and remembered that.

I'm using Liferea as an aggregator. Works well, nothing fancy. http://liferea.sourceforge.net/

Found out about O&A when I saw Jim Norton on Last Comic Standing and he was wearing the O&A XM shirt. ROCK! They so needed to be back on the air! Re: Item 6...Yay for the Python reference! There is NO rule 6! G'day Bruce! Thanks Wil!

Hey Wil,
We have an London, Ontario so we do say London, England because of the two different places.
Glad EW printed that letter in your defence. It's about frigging time someone there got a backbone.

Enjoy your lovely day.

I would also have to recommend Bloglines for an RSS reader. Finding the best RSS reader was a mission of mine for about 6 months, I tried FeedReader, SharpReader, NetNewsWire(Mac), Sage and finally Bloglines. Bloglines works well because you can check it on multiple computers and it will remember what you have read. This is very nice if you do use multiple computers so you do not have to weed through articles you have read already when you move locations. Instead of boring everyone else with my opinions on the other programs, I will simply leave with my Bloglines recommendation

Another vote for http://www.bloglines.com. It's an excellent RSS aggregator and works everywhere!

i'll throw in another vote for sage. It is unobtrusive and integrated so nicely into firefox.

My news reader is NewsFire ( http://NewsFireRSS.com/ ) which is relatively new. It is a Mac reader, and is obviously from a small developer, as there is a menu item to "iChat with Developer".

My favorite RSS reader is NetNewsWire, which unfortunately doesn't run in Linux. I also like bloglines, which works anywhere in any web browser. It's pretty easy to move between them since both of them can import & export OPML files.

Keep the suggestions coming. I'm new to the whole RSS thing, so I'm listening carefully...

Guess someone at Entertainment WEAKly does like you, Wil. The vendetta they seem to have can't cover the whole staff, and it looks like someone on the inside listened to Ellen (and all of us who wrote). Hopefully, that staffer bought DB and JAG, read them, discovered what hella-good books they really are, and will now pass them around to the other staffers...

There are some good pics of Mount St. Helens, including the recent stem emission on 10-01, at this site: http://www.pnsn.org/NEWS/PRESS_RELEASES/MSH_09_2004.html

The pics were taken from a helicopter, and are hi-res images.

OOPS! That should read steam. Sorry!

RSS reader = Gush and it runs on Linux. http://www.2entwine.com/

Dude, I could so be reading too much into things, but maybe Entertainment WEAKly slipped a barb into the title of that blurb. Maybe the gomer who wrote the blurb is too stupid to even know this, and I'm over-intellectualizing, but "Triumph of the Wil(l)" is the title of the infamous Leni Riefenstahl propaganda film made for the Nazi party. So, is ET now trying to say you've got some sort of mindless following here? Like I said. I could be thinking too much. But it did catch my eye. There ARE people that snarky in the world.

Its about time EW listened to the readers of WWDN. And printed the retraction. When will we hear about the results from the audition?

And other news today, The Seattle Mariniers fired manager Bob Melvin after only his 2nd year as the skipper of the Mariniers. We should have seen it coming after this year went down the crapper.

I predict a Dodgers vs Yankees WS. and the Yankees win by game 6.

Go Yankees, and good ridance to bob melvin.

Hold up - more than 40 posts and no one has mentioned making a donation(item the first...) ??I'll get the ball rolling on that $1000 WWdN goal with the first $10, Wil. Who needs to argue over whether it's Dubbya's fault the money is needed... just donate, monkeys!
Also - I'm in Vancouver, Washington (I can see St. Helen's from the freeway) and the whole thing is way cool to watch.

re: item the second,

I use Bottom Feeder (http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/BottomFeeder/index.html)

I like it because it doesn't try to change how I use my browser (FireFox, btw), like some of them do, yet it is easy to have it open items in the browser.

Their own blurb says:
"BottomFeeder is a news aggregator client (RSS and Atom) written in VisualWorks Smalltalk. BottomFeeder runs on x86 Linux (also FreeBSD), PowerPC linux, Sparc Linux, Windows (98/ME/NT/2000/XP), Mac OS8/9, Mac OS X, AIX, SGI Irix, Compaq UNIX, HP-UX, and Solaris."

I'll throw another vote onto the Bloglines pile. They just announced an API that'll allow programs like the excellent NetNewsWire to sync with it, so you can use NetNewsWire at home and Bloglines at other computers and keep all your subscriptions synced.

Mozilla Thunderbird also reads feeds now. It also supports PGP email and has a good spam filter.

My favourite rss reader is rss2email, it (wow! shock!) sends you e-mail messages for each feed item it retrieves.

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/rss2email/

iain

My favorite RSS reader is RSS Bandit. Doesn't have a Linux version, but it's pretty good (and free).

Check out aKregator if you are using KDE. (http://akregator.sourceforge.net/) It is a little rough around the edges but is easy to install and maintain within Debian.

I was at the St Helen site when it occured. One second it was calm and clear. A reload later, there it goes. Was a little disapointed that they temporarily went from a 5 minute update to 10. Oh well. still some great pics.
The one thing I found amusing was that two pics before the smoke there was a fly sitting on the cam

Mozilla thunderbird is an awesome RSS program, and email program. And its not even in a final release state. All platforms too(well major platforms Win/Mac/Lin). And its open source. How can you go wrong? ^_^ Also thanks for the poker links Wil, way helpful

I've got another vote for Sage (http://sage.mozdev.org/). I don't have to open another program to use it, it's small and simple yet it does everything I want an aggregator to do. It has no frills, but I don't need a lot of frills. Sage is the nifty.

I want to thank you so much for encouraging total strangers to donate towards my fundraising goal with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I really appreciate everyone's generosity!

To use Firefox's RSS reader, if there's a 'RSS' logo at the bottom right of your status bar, click it, then check your bookmarks.

To use RSS with Thunderbird, go to New->Account, then News/Blogs. Then in the left hand mail area, right click on 'News & Blogs' and click 'Manage Subscriptions', then 'Add' and type in the RSS url. Then 'Get Mail' to retrieve the news item.

You will need the latest versions of Firefox and Thunderbird to do this.

I'll give another vote to Thunderbird, it works well as an email/RSS news program.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Yahoo! RSS feeds if you setup a My Yahoo account. It works fairly well, and it lets you check from any computer. Not quite as full featured as bloglines, but still nifty.

When it comes to RSS readers, I've tried quite a few of the free ones, but I ended up speding the money on FeedDemon (runs on Windows only).

http://www.feeddemon.com

Nick Bradbury has done a great job with this program and is very willing to entertain enhancement ideas submitted via his web site's forum.

Spend the thirty bucks and support Nick's work. You won't be disappointed.

Wil, you have impressionable kids and a wife you love - why endorse spending $ on those
two O&A guys. Would you really want your
kids and wife exposed to public sex at random
spots in LA?

Here's their bio - they deserved to be booted.
http://www.foundrymusic.com/opieanthony/bio.cfm/div/opieanthony/page/opieanthony_bio.html

I love reading your blog for lots of reasons...but one is a glimpse into the mind of a write. I'm a wanna-be writer and its nice to see someone else has the same strategies and sometime new strategies for "getting on with it".

Rock on,
Pixie

Wil,

I use the Sage extention for Firefox for my RSS feeds. Also the new Firefox 1.0 supports "live bookmarks" which is a fancy term for RSS feeds. If the page you are browsing has a fees, an orange tab labeled "RSS" appears in the botton right hand corner of your browser. Click that and it will prompt you to add it as a book mark. It is pretty cool!

Ian

I'm using Liferea, runs in Linux http://liferea.sourceforge.net/.

Works just fine for me!

As far as RSS readers go, I've stuck with rawdog (http://offog.org/code/rawdog.html) because it's very easy, outputs a simple html file with all of your feeds which you can then read from your browser, and you can call it from cron, so updates happen automagically. It supports Atom, all flavors of RSS, and even CDF (whatever that is).

Too much RSS talk in these comments, and not enough baseball. The playoffs start tomorrow, fer cryin' out loud! Priorities, people.

I've always liked the Dodgers as a franchise and team. That being said--Cardinals in 4.

yeah, i'm gonna hafta go with the latest Mozilla Thunderbird for RSS feeds. Thunderbird just rocks, and it tastes great with Linux, too.

Item the tenth...

My Cardinals are GONNA, well, BEAT your Dodgers. So there. :P

Well, I use thunderbird for RSS, but your feeds don't show no more than the title, apparently!

from Italy,

Andy

Will,

Thank you SO MUCH for mentioning my sister's Team in Training page! You rule!

She still has a lot to raise, but donations are pouring in from your readers...

Thank you again. I owe you.

Wil,

I'm always happy to read about you and your family's involvement with "Team in Training". I interviewed them back in August for my lil radio program here in Kansas City and thought they were a great group of people...hopefully I'll have the opprotunity to sit down with them again for another episode (hopefully sponsor an upcoming event. Also thanks a lot of posting the suggested reading for us ignorant on how to play great poker. And as always KUDOS on the great site!

Bryan
KCMO

I'm extrememly excited to hear O&A have made it back onto the airwaves. And signing with XM just allows for the creative freedom to say what's funny without that fucking FCC getting in the way.

It is a very controvercial program (one which I believe to be BEYOND hysterical), so if people don't like it, all they have to do is not listen. But it is a wonderful show to promote some of the best comics out there that many people may have never heard about any other way. And who doesn't love Opie's tussable golden locks? ;-)

p.s. O&A always win in the end.

Thanks Wil for posting about my friend's sisters Team in Training!

As soon as I have a chance I'm gona draw you since you're a great guy!

So far, I've only been reading WWdN via RSS, but I've been using Mozilla Thunderbird, and it seems to work pretty well. I like how it handles my email as well....

I did, however, have to open up the page in Firefox to post this comment.

Random Wil Moment: I was at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Md. this weekend and saw that someone was selling colored chibi (or super-deformed) fan art pictures for $10. He had his portfolio page opened to a section that had a chibi-Borg and chibi-Geordi on it, so naturally I asked him if he could do an Ensign Wesley Crusher for me. Best $10 I ever spent at a convetion; I'll scan it in and show it to you when I get a scanner.

EW: I was very happy to see that the letter that was printed in EW was a very nice moderate letter. Shows the quality of the WWdN readers, y'know? Moderation is very good.

PokerLizard Interview: Great second half. He asked questions that I don't think I would have asked, and that's the mark of a great interviewer. I also empathize on the "whole lack of press" thing. It feels like shouting into a void, doesn't it?

Many thanks, Wil, for helping my daughter, Sari, with her donations to the Leukemia & Lymphona Society. As my daughter, Gia, said: "You rule!" Thank you, good kharma people.

Never really listened to Opie & Anthony.

What do you think of Stern? Do you ever listen to him?

I've beeen using Bloglines.com, which is browser based and can be accessed from anywhere while keeping your read documents in sync. There is also a feature to establish email addresses for a mail feed. You can also publish your blogrole and manmy other nice features. They seem to add something new every week or so.

My favorite RSS Reader is NewsGator. I always have Outlook open anyway, so it's one less appliation running.

I hope the Dodgers make the series, but lose to the Minnesota Twins. Shades of 1965 (but with a better outcome!)

Count me in the TON who wrote to EW in your defense. :-)

Also, hate to break it to you, Wil, but your Dodgers are goin' down courtesy of the Cardinals. Sorry, but I'm a born and bred Cards fan.

For RSS, I use Sharpreader [http://www.sharpreader.net/] because it works the way I expect it to, and the way I like to work.

Windows only though.

You did great until you got to "the hated Giants" thing. That is such an L.A. thing. I've never heard "the hated Dodgers" up here. And everyone hates the Dodgers up here. It's just a game. I am definitely rooting for the Cardinals.

Bloglines - I love bloglines. Web-based, and accessible from anywhere. Easy-to-use interface. It's great.

Said Wil: "I'm stunned that EW would print anything in my defense, and I'm even more stunned that they didn't take another shot at me."

Actually they snuck a nasty one in where you weren't looking, dude. :(

"Triumph of the Will" is a documentary praising Adolph Hitler. And they referenced it while talking about you.

Nuff said.

(sigh)
Do we have to clue them in AGAIN??!!

10th YEAH WHAT A GAME!! My wife and 2 boys and I watched it, and had to "relive the moment" MANY times later that evening. What a game!

Game 1 of the 1988 series was featured on "Beyond the Glory" this past weekend. I was 17 years old when that happened. It has to be the greatest sports moment I've ever seen in person. I scrounged up enough money to buy a ticket. Packed my bags and drove the 6 hours from San Jose to L.A. in time for the game. The plan was to turn around and head back home after the game. I was way too exhausted after it was over and wound up sleeping in my car at a rest stop a couple hours north of L.A.

You've NEVER heard "the hated Dodgers" in NorCal? I am a Dodger fan who lived in NorCal for 22 years. EVERY time they play the Dodgers at some point you hear the chant..."BEAT L A, BEAT L A"... you never hear that kind of chant at a Dodger game! You also can;t get even part way through the stadium without seeing a "Duck the Fodgers" T-shirt.

I totally agree with Nick!
I live in the central valley
IT'S ALL about HATE the Dodgers!

Concerning newsreaders -- I use Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) because it's accessible any time I have net access -- which, coincedentally, is the only time I'm concerned about getting my RSS feeds. Synergistic? Perhaps. Convenient? You betcha.

Concerning EW: There's probably a couple of writers who have it in for you, but the editor is neutral. Now that there's been letters, if this is the case, you may see more balanced stuff in the future because that same editor may be watching for your name from now on...

I have to agree with you Will on your comment about Steve Finley's grand slam homerun against the Giants being right up there with Kirk Gibson's homer in the 88 World Series.

Sadly though it appears our beloved Dodgers are getting their butts handed to them by the Cardinals as I typed this. Hopefully they will mount a comeback but down from 7 runs could be difficult . Go Dodger Blue!

Item Seven- (what a coincidence) is a total gas. My co-workers seem to find enjoyment as well. They've been making that damned sheep say "Ooh la-la!" for the past two hours. The boss has already threatened to kill me twice. Where do you find this stuff.

Several months ago I was asking this exact same question. I demanded Linux support, so that limited my options.

Executive summary: Bloglines roxors my world.

I was looking for something that behavior similarlly to a good Usenet news reader or email client. The ability to save interesting posts was important.

I tried NewsMonster, but never got it working. It should work on Linux, but seems finicky (demands root access to install, never quite worked right).

I used Straw. It's tolerably good. On the down side, it needs PyGTK which isn't quite standard on most Linux distros yet (but probably changing). It did the job, but the HTML rendering wasn't yet up to par.

A few months ago I switched to Bloglines. Bloglines is web based. It Just Works. I can use it almost anywhere (although it does use frames and javascript, so the simple browser on my Sony Clie don't like it) It's got a solid interface and over the last few months they've added some small but cool features. It's free. A cool feature I recently started using is the ability to set up disposable email addresses. Subscribe the address to a mailing list and see the list integrated as part of the feed. I use this for several low volume news-letter things I like and it works great. Bloglines rocks. I'm happy enough that if they end up going commercial I would subscribe if it was reasonably priced.

Can I just mention how utterly freaked I am by being mentioned on the front page of WWdN? And not just mentioned, quoted at length? And how ashamed I am at spelling Guinness wrong? I blame living in England, they make it with water from the Thames, not the Liffey, so I can only bring myself to drink it in stressful situations. (Fear not, readers, Wil is OK - in the USA they import it)

I'm clearly going to have to send $10 to Sari in penance (appropriate since she is running the Dublin marathon)

Firefox 1.0 has an RSS reader built-in. Major usability points: when a page has a feed, an RSS icon shows up, which you can click on to bookmark in a feeds folder. These "livemarks" are shown in the sidebar, and update when you click on them. A bummer that it doesn't show text previews of the entries however.

Cardinals 9, Dodgers 3. St. Louis in 4, Wil.

I use Sage, a plugin for Firefox, to handle my RSS. I like it because it sits in my sidebar, and i can have it update while I'm reading other stuff, then click on whatever bolds up. Your site is in there, of course.

P.S. Mentioning this again - I heard you'll be in Dallas for a con this month! Will there be poker at the con? :)

I have tried Bloglines, but I don't like it much, I use Stardock's Blog Navigator on Windows, haven't quite set up one on my Linux box yet.

Favorite RSS reader? I like to use Opera to read my RSS feeds. Mainly, it's because it's already running as my primary browser. I don't have to have multiple apps running on my slow machine. The new stuff just pops up automatically, and I can click on urls in those special ways that only Opera does, so I don't have to re-think those movements that are already natural.

It's not perfect, but I find most imperfections have more to do with RSS providers not doing things correctly.

O & A were okay. Only just. I thought their B-team at WNEW, Ron & Fez were on an entirely other level. Ron & Fez dealt with the same themes, but where O & A were all ballpeen hammer root canal, Ron & Fez were nuanced and funny as fuck.

My .02

Ahem, Bloglines runs on linux, serverly and cliently.