Besides subscribing to our RSS feed you can also get email updates every day with all of the latest posts. Just subscribe by email here.

I’ve always been dissatisfied with online RSS feed readers. I used newsgator for a while, tried to get the hang of bloglines and tried a couple of less well known ones. I also tried Google Reader and was very disappointed.

A couple weeks ago however Google radically updated it’s reader and now it’s vastly improved. Although it’s still in Google labs it is certainly the best web based reader I’ve found. Check it out here.

Update: What is RSS? Check here.

It seems our server had a little bit of trouble today, as you probably noticed if you tried to access the comments or permalinks. JD has kindly and quickly fixed the problem, so hopefully everything will continue to work.

Update: For those of you who’ve been using the “subscribe to comments” feature, we’ve disabled it while we work to see what’s causing us trouble. If everything goes well, we should have it up and running in a few days.

Update: ‘Subscribe to comments’ should work now.

Many members of the conservative blogosphere have followed the debacle at the Washington Post’s new conservative blog, Red America; and yesterday’s resignation amid charges of plagarism. Ben has an apology at Red State today.

I want to apologize to National Review Online, my friends and colleagues here at RedState, and to any others that have been affected over the past few days. I also want to apologize to my previous editors and writers whose work I used inappropriately and without attribution. There is no excuse for this - nor is there an excuse for any obfuscation in my earlier statement.

I hope that nothing I’ve done as a teenager or in my professional life will reflect badly on the movement and principles I believe in.

I’m deeply grateful for the love and encouragment of all those around me. And although I may not deserve such support, it makes it that much more humbling at a time like this. I’m a young man, and I hope that in time that I can earn a measure of the respect that you have given me.

Regards,

Ben

With our new home we also have a new Sounding the Trumpet feed. And although our old url forwards here our old feeds will not work. So if you’re one of our subscribers, you’ll need to update your feed.

However, we’ve made it very easy to add the feed to your favorite rss reader, as a Firefox live bookmark or to your Google home page. Just click on RSS or Atom on the bottom of the left column.

As you can see, we also have a comments feed for the whole blog (as well as comments feeds for each post).

Welcome all to the new home of Sounding the Trumpet! Although, we have all really enjoyed using Blogger, we felt the time was ready to leave. I’m still getting my bearings using Wordpress, but it’s been fun learning. Wordpress is an extremely powerful open source blogging platform can be extended or modified pretty much any which way.

There’s also a ton of new features included in the native software that either are non existent or don’t work well with Blogger, such as categories, commenting and trackback. Although for a long time you had to buy a domain name and space to use Wordpress, now there are several free bloghosts that are quick and easy to set up.

The blog is in working condition, but I’m sure you’ll see some tweakings in the next couple weeks.

I’ve also set our former Blogger address to forward to this address.

Hello all! Coyote asked me to join Sounding the Trumpet, especially as he’s been away a lot. I’ve been an avid reader of this blog since soon after it started. I hope to continue to offer the same kind of commentary and reporting that you’ve all been expecting.

Thanks for reading our blog — you don’t know how much it has meant to us, and for linking to us, and writing about us. I really enjoyed blogging, the comments our readers left, and the letters they wrote. I also appreciated other bloggers and news sites talking about us and things we had said. I thank you all for reading, blogging, and linking.

Although we really enjoyed blogging, it takes a lot of time! During the holidays, away from Cornell, time was needed to relax — but mainly to spend with our families. . .I blogged less and less, and eventually not at all.

Maybe some day — though I don’t know when yet, I, or some other noisy students, will once again give you the conservative commentary you looked forward so much to. . . I apologize for not writing this the day I stopped blogging, but I had big hopes to start writing again fast.

We’ve been realizing that the blog has been taking a long time to load lately. I thought it was just our computers till one of our readers kindly alerted us that she was also having trouble.

I usually use Firefox. However, when I tried using opening it up on Internet Explorer on one of the fast library computers it crashed the browser.

It seems like we now fixed the problem. Please let us know if any of you run into any more problems or if it still loads slow.

Evangelical outpost has continued his great posts on blogging (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) as well as one post where he links to some very insigtful posts by others on the art, science and frustration of blogging.

As you can see, I’ve changed the name of trackback to ‘echo’; sounding the trumpet, you get the idea. Besides our reciprocal blogroll, we’re also taking Joe Carter’s advice on blogrolling taxonomy. I’m still hashing out a system of cataloging our blogroll, but it should be done soon.

Parts of the conservative blogosphere have been aflame the last couple days over Nick Coleman’s article attacking Powerline and other conservative blogs. The flame became a blaze after Henry Farrell argued that conservative blogs have no right to accuse the Main Stream Media (MSM) of bias. Hindrocket at Powerline made some very important distinctions in his response:

“. . . .I think that distinctions can usefully be drawn among several concepts that are often assumed to be interchangeable: bias, objectivity and neutrality. “Bias” is usually used pejoratively; I would use it to mean reporting news in a way that is in fact slanted, while purporting to report it neutrally. I would say that the New York Times is biased, but Power Line isn’t. “Objectivity” I understand to mean, essentially, fairness. Being objective means to weigh evidence and arguments fairly, as, for example, by reporting that President Bush turned in a mediocre performance in a debate, even though the person making that judgment supports the President. I would say that Power Line is objective, or at least tries to be, while 60 Minutes is not objective. “Neutrality” means indifference as among competing parties, candidates or ideologies. Power Line is not neutral; neither is the Washington Post. There are probably a few truly neutral news sites or commentators, but not many.

“Not everyone will agree with my definitions; maybe no one will. But I think it is helpful to distinguish among these various concepts. In general, “bias” is not a term that it is helpful to apply to commentators, as opposed to reporters. Paul Krugman is a liberal and Ann Coulter is a conservative. One could say that they are both “biased” because they argue for a particular point of view, but that would be meaningless and unhelpful, in my opinion. With respect to commentatary, which is what we at Power Line generally do, the relevant questions are: Are the facts accurately and fairly represented? Are there other, obviously relevant facts that are omitted from the analysis? And, are the arguments made on the basis of the facts logical and persuasive?. . . .

“. . .like op-ed columnists, one of the things that we do is to critique the accuracy and fairness–call it “bias”–of news reports in the mainstream press. When we critique mainstream news sources, we try to be objective, but we are not neutral.”

We at the Sounding the Trumpet are also not neutral, but our aim and hope is to be objective and fair in our coverage of events and issues — both here at Cornell and around the world.

Hugh Hewitt’s new book Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World will be coming out soon and promises to answer this question with a good introduction and overview of the blogosphere and blogging. Several bloggers have written reviews, including Polipundit, Instapundit, and Evangelical Outpost. Specially interesting should be his comparison between the rise of the blogosphere and the Reformation.

Update: Here is another review.