What is that funny orange box over on the right there?

Observers who have been observing may begin to notice a little orange boxy thing with rounded whathaveyous appearing in the right hand sidebar of the blog. I suspect some of you are wondering what it is and if I do not explain it soon no doubt sleepless nights will follow.

It is the symbol for what is know as the ‘feed’ for this blog. If you click it you will be taken to a page which allows you to ‘subscribe’ to the Cartoon Blog using all manner of different ‘feed reading’ sites and programmes. These include things like:

• Bloglines – this is the one I use.
• My Yahoo – this is your own personal homepage sort of thing on Yahoo
• Google – your own personalised Google page with your favourite sites on it.
• Firefox – If you use this web browser you will see the same little orange symbol in the address bar when the site you are lookining at has a feed you can subscribe to.

But why bother with all this? Well, the idea is that using one of these feed-reading sites or programmes can make it much quicker to look at all your favourite websites, blogs, news sites and podcasts. You can do it all in one go without having to go and visit each site in turn, which means you have more time to do other things, like go out for a walk in the darkness, mist and rain.

So go on – click it now and see what happens.