The US Open has an RSS feed. Bing, as Dave Winer would say.

But the IBM folk who created the site should have another look. There’s the friendly orange XML icon on the home page, but don’t try copying the URL for your aggregator. It’s actually a link to a page that explains RSS, where there is a plain text URL to highlight and copy.

It’s a step forward, but it would have been so simple to do it better.

I’m slowly recovering the hundred or so posts that sort of vanished when I ported over from Manila to WordPress. For observant readers, you’ll find the Archives in the right-hand column here seem to grow mysteriously from time to time.

This isn’t because I’m confecting posts. It’s because I’ve retrieved something from, say, March 2001 and restored it to its rightful place. It hasn’t been my highest priority, but it is fun going back to these very old (in weblog terms) posts.

Like many others, I occasionally suffer from comment spam. Fortunately, WordPress has a nifty option where you can list any words that should trigger holding a comment in a moderation queue, or even blacklisting it. There’s even a helpful list of common spam words in the WordPress Codex.

What, however, is Vale of Glamorgan Conservatives doing in the list? Of course I’d regard anything from the Conservative party as spam, but still…

If any readers want to subscribe to Davos Newbies in its new guise, the correct feed address is here.

As you might have noticed, I’ve switched Davos Newbies from Manila to WordPress. It’s a work in progress, so do bear with me in case there are any glitches.

Although I’ve moved from Manila after five-and-a-half years, I still feel a huge debt to Dave Winer, who developed the software and who was the original person to encourage me (and so many others) to weblog. It now seems an utterly obvious thing to blog about creating the Davos program, but Dave saw the potential of that years before anyone else.

Dave has been a constant support for both Davos Newbies and myself. When the time came for me to move, he swiftly moved to help me with the transition. Thanks, Dave.

I can’t say moving from Manila to WordPress is the simplest thing in the world. Fortunately, Jason Levine, who wrote a clever bit of software for just this task, kindly offered to do the crucial exportation for me. We’ve never met, never corresponded before. Another great example of the continuing kindness of the blogosphere.