The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I've been playing browser games lately. I've had my laptop for about a year and a half now and in that time I've spent a lot of time playing with software and one of the hottest things on my list has been browsers. I've never been a fan of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but it came pre-loaded so I spent some time with it, only to find that I still didn't care for it much. Next came Apple's own Safari. Again built-in, but with no tabbed browsing available, it soon went away. Next came a small browser from Japan called Shiira that ran at lightening speed. It was much quicker loading than Safari, but again, it just didn't do it. So now I've moved on to Firefox. Firefox is a free download available from Mozilla. This browser has tabbed browsing, a built-in search bar and a bookmarking system that is completely customizable. After only a few week's use; I'm sold. But all of this playing with browsers still didn't solve my problem. I've become addicted to weblogs. All kinds of them. Tech logs, logs about people's lives, their thoughts, news, gadgets, and general cool stuff online. But they were clogging up my bookmarks bar and they were taking a lot of time to check every day. By the time I surfed through all of these sites, checking to see if there was anything new on them, I had used up a lot of valuable time. This is how I learned about RSS RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a descendent of the Push technology which was all over the web a few years ago. Basically RSS is a delivery boy for the headlines you choose. If a site has an RSS feed you have subscribed to, each time it is updated, your RSS reader automatically downloads the new headlines onto your machine, saving you the time of going to check the sites again and again to see if anything new has been posted. The first step is to download and set up an RSS reader. There are a lot of them available for download. Awasu, FeedDemon, and Pluck are three top readers available. Most of these programs are available as a free download, but must be purchased for about $20 after a trial period. An exception is Awasu which remains free. Also available for free is the RSS service at bloglines.com, a website that you can set an account up with which serves as an online RSS reader. Once you have your reader installed, it is time to set your feeds. Depending on your reader, you basically set it up to subscribe to a feed available at a certain URL by pasting in the address into your software's subscribe function. When you have done this, the feed will automatically update itself whenever the website or weblog is updated. The only problem with RSS is that it is almost too easy too use. After only a few weeks I found myself with over 100 feeds and I had to take a serious look at what I was actually reading and what could be safely pruned away. The combination of a powerful browser with the features you need and an RSS reader will save you a lot of surfing time looking for information you know you are going to track down anyway. Instead of going to get it, let it come to you. ([email protected])
