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I don’t know if you are like me, but I find myself browsing a lot of different sites a day, mainly blogs and news sites. It is mildly inconvenient, however, because going to each individual site takes a lot of time. Want I want is a way to quickly scan the headlines of these news stories and blog entries, and read only the ones that interest me.

Enter RSS. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and provides a way for other web sites or programs to quickly load a list of headlines and stories and stay updated as the site itself is updated.

It does this by providing an RSS feed–an XML document–that contains a summary of the updated content. Applications such as Sage or web sites such as Bloglines can access those and keep track of new stories for you. It really makes it neat.

The Sage feed reader is an extension for the popular Firefox web browser. One click and it is installed, and from there you can add your feeds and even change the look of the story preview (if you know how to write CSS, that is. There’s no visual editor).

Sage has a really easy interface for adding RSS feeds. You open the Sage Sidebar (View->Sidebar->Sage) and to add a feed, visit a site such as Digg.com, and click on the “Discover Feeds” button. It’s the one that looks like an hourglass.

Once you add the feed, you’ll see the site listed in the sidebar with a list of the recently updated stories. Clicking those stories takes you directly to the site, or if you click on the site name, the main window updates with a list of all the updated stories.

I highly recommend this extension, especially if you like having an overview of the stories and blog entries posted at your favorite sites.

Click here to get Firefox

Click here to install Sage

It has been a solid month with no activity on the house-selling front. I’d be lying if I hadn’t thought that maybe the house was in too terrible a condition to sell, especially for the price we are asking. I’ll admit, I was starting to second guess the decision to uproot our lives and move back to Oklahoma.

That is, until Lori called me tonight with great news. Not only did we have an offer for the house, we actually received two offers on the same day! I’m flabbergasted, but it happened. The first offer was for our asking price, and the second for slightly more. Our real estate agent is going to look over some details of the offers and the loans the people are approved for, and then go back to the people who made the first offer (for our asking price) to see if they can do any better.

I’m starting to get excited. It’s finally becoming real that we’re going to be back in Oklahoma!