How you can read hundreds of web sites in just a few minutes a day.
I’m sure most people have a few websites that they visit on a weekly or even a daily basis only to find out that there is nothing new to read. Going from site to site, typing in each website address or clicking on your bookmarks or shortcuts. Instead of going out to 10 or even 100 different wesbites to see what is new and exciting, how about if you could see all your favorite websites all on one page and only one place to visit for all the updates on your favorite websites that you would normally be visiting manually?
Let me introduce to you a technology that you may have not heard of, its called Really Simple Syndication or RSS for short. Its everywhere, and most likely available on all your favorite sites.
Here’s how it works:
First get a RSS reader, this part is easy. Lets start of with some choices that are free and pretty effective. There is Google’s Reader application, Bloglines, and Yahoo. There are other free readers, many online versions and many that you install on your computer. I am only mentioning these three just to keep it simple and give you a general idea on how RSS works and how you can try it out without costing anything but a few minutes of your time. I already have a Google email account, so I mainly use Google’s Reader, its simple, quick and gets the job done. Plus I can view my RSS feeds via my Windows Mobile device, so I have it on the go if needed.
So you’ve picked one and signed up, now all you have to do is add your feeds to your reader or what the industry calls "subscribing". You may have seen a logo like the ones below:
Click on an icon respective to the reader you have signed up for and your browser should ask you to login to your feed reader site. After which you can organize your feeds into categories or folders or anything that makes sense to you. Now when the web site author updates their web site with new information, that will automatically be displayed in your feed reader for your reading pleasure and all in one location.
Here is an pretty good video explanation on RSS feeds that I found a while back:
Toshiba Preps 128GB Solid-State Notebook Drive
Toshiba this week said it plans before April to ship a 128 GB solid-state drive that will appear first in Toshiba notebooks sold in Japan. The drive, which has no moving parts, achieves the unusually high capacity at a lower cost than most SSDs through the use of multi-level cell NAND flash technology.
Vista SP1 officially released
Looks like all those rumors yesterday were true — Microsoft has just posted up the official standalone version of Vista SP1
Firefox 3 goes on a diet, eats less memory than IE and Opera
Benchmarks show that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7 and Opera. A number of significant fixes and improvements have brought down the open-source browser’s memory footprint and could make it a more viable choice in mobile environments.
It’s official: HD DVD is dead, the format war over
Toshiba just made a statements saying, “It will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.” Finally.
Microsoft posts new Windows XP SP3 build, RC2 to the public
Two weeks after it last handed a new build of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to several thousand invitation-only testers, Microsoft Corp. today posted that version for public downloading. Want to try it out? Here’s how: Uninstall RC1 if you have that first, download the reg patch from http://tinyurl.com/2mflo7 , then run windows update to get it.
Wanna protect Windows from Hackers?…Set NO Password !!
I didn’t know about this…and its actually recommended by Microsoft. Your Windows XP computer is more safe if you don’t set any password at all than using some weak password like “abc123″ which can be easily guessed by hackers.
RSS in plain English
A video tutorial explaining the basics of RSS, as simple and elegant as Common Craft’s inimitable paper-and-marker technique.
Performance Tuning for Firefox
Here is a nifty program I cam across to simplify the tweaking of Mozilla Firefox. Its called Firetune. You run the application, and it fine tunes Firefox settings for the type of speed of your computer and the speed of your internet connection. Its simple and it works.
FireTune for Mozilla Firefox was developed for an optimization of your browsing experience with Firefox. It is based on a collection of popular and well working optimization settings used and tested by the experts. Usually you have to optimize Firefox manually, which can be time consuming and difficult for the novice user. FireTune helps you here–it includes all the performance optimizations.
iPhone going the corporate route
Seems like the iPhone will now be able to connect to Microsoft Exchange servers for email now. I have actually been waiting for that since the iPhone was first introduced. The support should be available to iPhones in an a 2.0 update in late June as per an article in ZDNet. Some of the features promised in the update are:
- Deliver a global address list and push contact.
- Support Cisco IPSec VPN, enterprise class WiFi. (Was this part of a deal to end the iPhone naming spat?)
- Allow security policies and remote wipe.
- Enterprise configuration.
- And support for Exchange (also see Microsoft’s Q&A). Along those lines Apple has licensed ActiveSync for the iPhone. Mary Jo Foley reported that a Microsoft-Apple deal was in the works last year.
More on the iPhone here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8179&tag=nl.e540
