Download and installation was straightforward and easy and accepting all the defaults got the program up and running in no time. I initially tested it with a directory of space images I have on my drive and it worked flawlessly. So I decided to take it up a notch and try out the RSS feed option.

The folks at Deviant Art have a great selection of images so I pulled the RSS feed for space images into Background Switcher as shown below:

Click image to see full size

When the next switch occurred the program grabbed and image from the RSS feed – slick!

Now I get a fresh image on my desktop (currently every 10 minutes) and I don’t need to go hunting for images to increase  my collection for more variety (saving time for other things).

Do you use Background Switcher or another program to change your background? Post your suggestions in the comments below.

(John’s Background Switcher requires Windows and Microsoft .NET 2.0)

Now most folks are familiar with using RSS to follow their favorite blog but what most folks miss is the RSS feed button right below the pictures of all the folks that person is following.

All you need to do is click on that little orange icon to add that twitter’s tweets to your RSS reader of choice.

Once you’ve done that you won’t have to worry about missing out on something they’d tweeted about, even when you’re not logged in yourself.

For those that are worried about productivity by adding these RSS feeds to your reader you can effectively follow along without feeling the need to tweet back right away, retweet something or get caught up in reading the ‘all friends’ stream (and you know you do).

Do you use RSS feeds to follow your favorite twitters? Post in the comments and share.

Be sure to follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/scotnewbury

As it turns out there is an article in the Wordpress Codex – Moving Wordpress – which gives a step by step process on moving your Wordpress blog. After backing up my data I followed the process and everything went smoothly and the blog was up and running at the new address in no time at all. I still need to finish up some housekeeping but with few exceptions everything is running just fine.

The other item I needed to address was how to handle all the inbound traffic that the blog was still seeing. While the number of hits and views had dropped off after I cut way back on posting there is still a fair amount of traffic to the site – I couldn’t possibly contact everyone that had an inbound link and I didn’t want to just “vanish” and leave a lot of broken links so I decided to setup redirection for the site.

Most folks at this point hit up Google and do a search on redirection just as I did. What you’ll find is a whole host of ways to handle this. I read through a number of them and after digesting them decided there had to be a better way than setting up .htaccess files, HTML or PHP redirects. It took a digging but I finally found and settled on a Wordpress plugin – Redirection on Urban Giraffe written by John Godley.

Installing this plugin was straightforward and went smoothly and thanks to the plugin’s ability to handle expressions I was able to set up redirects for entire YEARS worth of posts instead of having to one for each and every post as shown here (click for larger image):

All told it took less that 45 minutes to setup the redirection for the entire site and it’s been working without issue since then so I would recommend if you are in need of redirecting traffic for your Wordpress blog to check out this plugin.

Once again you can get it from John’s website at: Urban Giraffe or from the Wordpress Codex.

How have you used this plugin or did you use a different approach? Your comments are welcome.

We’ll here’s the deal – I decided to move my role-playing game blog to http://ofdiceanddragons.newburyonline.com as I’ve decided that I want to shift my major blogging focus to items that I seem to spend most of my time on – scripting, social networking, software hacks – and also to give me a platform to comment on things I may also find of interest.

Does this mean that I won’t post about gaming again? To be honest I probably will post from time to time as I still enjoy that aspect of my life but it is no longer the focus it once was.

For those that want to follow my role-playing game musing you’ll want to head to http://ofdiceanddragons.newburyonline.com and use the link there to update your RSS and/or email feed.

If you’re interested in what else I’ll be blogging about, stick around and enjoy the ride.