A few thousand people stopped by today from Sploid, and I’m glad to see quite a few decided to stick around and subscribe. You all probably wouldn’t have noticed, but quite a few changes have been made around here recently, and I want to update both you and my regular readers on what’s new behind the scenes at Homeland Stupidity.

First off, you’ve probably noticed the new clickables in the RSS feed, such as being able to add to del.icio.us, obtain a count of comments, view Technorati links, send me e-mail, and a couple of other things I’ve forgotten about. Enjoy and click a lot! The summary RSS feed will always be ad-free, and I’m working on something for the few of you who prefer a full-content feed.

Second, in the interests of reader anonymity, I’ve dropped the requirement for leaving a valid e-mail address. Feel free to leave it if you want, or just leave it blank. As the regulars know, I don’t ever send spam (in fact, I absolutely hate it, and write anti-spam tools on the side), so your address is safe as houses anyway. You should leave a valid address, though, if you expect me to contact you or reply privately to you.

Third, I’m experimenting with a new feature which will add a live version of Homeland Stupidity to the Google Personalized Homepage. If you aren’t familiar with it, go try it out. It lets you add your own news sources, RSS feeds, and more. And since yesterday, people can now write custom applications for it, which I did.

You can now read Homeland Stupidity and even leave comments without leaving the Google homepage. To do this, go to the page, and click on Add Content, then Create a Section. You’ll get a space to enter in a URL, and you should enter into that space. Then, assuming Google is working properly, Homeland Stupidity will appear and you’ll be able to browse articles and read and post comments directly from your Google homepage. Keep in mind, this Google feature is in beta, so it doesn’t work 100% of the time. This is, unfortunately, beyond my control.

And yes, I will release this software soon, once I’ve squashed more of the bugs that I’m sure lurk within.

Finally, I’m always on the lookout for tips, news stories, and anything else we might have missed here. If you have something you think Homeland Stupidity should cover, hit the nice Contact button and let me know. And if you need your anonymity preserved, let me know, and I’ll ensure that it is.

I’m also considering whether I should invite others to write for Homeland Stupidity. If you would like to, or you know someone who is interested, point them toward the comment form below.