I first met Ron via my website logs a year or so ago, strange as that may sound. I’d been perusing the list of referring sites by which people were coming to the overcast, and I noticed a site I didn’t recognize. What I found was Griddlecakes Radio, Ron’s well-produced family-friendly podcast. His theme? Storytelling in an audio medium. Once I heard his description of an encounter with a Homeowners’ Association, which hit very close to home at the time, I was hooked. I tune in to Griddlecakes now whenever I can. It’s a very different style than I do on my show - a lot more polish and professionalism, and a bit of a more formal structure and feel - but I enjoy listening to someone who is good at what they do, and obviously takes so much pride in his work.

I first met Ron (in any kind of interactive way) on Facebook just a few weeks ago, where we were pleasantly surprised to discover ourselves to be mutual fans of each others’ podcasts and each others’ blogs. (Ron’s blog is called Ron Amok, where he delves into the issues related to new media’s impact on business, marketing, and life.) His interest in machinima is very much an extension of his interest in democratized storytelling.

The other day, Ron emailed me via Facebook and asked if it would be possible for me to make the RSS feed for my blog one which included entire articles instead of just excerpts. It was silly of me to not have thought of that sooner, since when using Google Reader I certainly prefer feeds which include the entire article. I was a little concerned about just switching the entire feed over to that format, because I do like to encourage people to visit the site and participate in comments, and you can’t really do that in the RSS feed itself.

That’s when I found DualFeeds, a Wordpress plugin designed for this very purpose. I can now offer two variations of the feed from this blog: a slim and efficient version which contains excerpts (the default, which goes to Machinifeed) and a content-rich version which includes full articles. Both are accessible from the RSS Feeds drop down or the RSS Feeds page.

While I was at it, I set up a little widget on the front page of the blog which taps into my “Shared Picks” from Google Reader, I call it “Overman Recommends.” This is basically a way for me to keep a continual flow going of OverByte link-list content, directly as a function of me reading something of interest. With a single mouse click, I can mark an item in Reader as Shared, and it goes to that list. If you like, you can subscribe to “Overman Recommends” as an RSS feed, too! That’s also on the RSS Feeds page.

So thank you, Ron, for your suggestion! In pursuing a solution to it, I came upon some features which greatly enhance the overall extensibility of the site.