"Work smarter not harder." Scrooge McDuck

I have posted many times of the wonders of RSS feeds but I cannot explain with the written word as well as CommonCraft can with a short video. As per usual they do a great job of getting the viewer to understand the why and how of their subject. To put it simply if you want to save time and effort but still want to keep informed then watch this video.

“It's not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.” Marilyn Monroe

There are many ways to find podcasts because of the directories or communities that have sprung up. Podcast.net is a place to search for podcasts and the add them to your listening list or you can listen to episodes right there on the page. I did a search for Meet the Press, which is a podcast I listen to every Monday, and here are the results. If you decided you wanted to subscribe to this you can drag the RSS feed into your Podcast player of your choice. To find new and interesting podcasts I also head to Digg. Digg is a community of people who are constantly rating things they like by digging them. They have a very nice search utility that makes it easy to find newly popular stuff. The great thing about this medium is that anyone can broadcast and you can find shows that range from professionals on TV to a couple of guys in a basement that have a unique view of the world. Give it a try.

Rarely So Simple!

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a way of staying on top of what is new on a web page. This could be news or when there are new recipes added, anything really. Let’s say that you are interested in a web page and it’s contents but you are sick of going to the site and pulling it up and then finding that there is nothing new. Now enter RSS, this is a bit of computer code that can be used to let a piece of software called a reader to, well read the code and deliver then new news. Many people confuse email and RSS feeds. E-mail you get and if you do not read it it stays there filling up your inbox while RSS feeds can be looked at or not. There is no pressure with an RSS feed; you read or don’t. So far this sounds complicated but it is easy. You need a reader. There are many but I think Feedreader is the easiest and it is free. This one is for windows only. I will test a bunch for MAC as soon as I can. OK now that you have downloaded it and installed it you can start looking for either the orange letters that say RSS or you can just subscribe to it. To do so, go to the webpage and then open Feedreader and then add it using the button “new”. Now you can play with all the features but while the Feedreader is open it pops up with a window that shows anything new on your selected pages. Give it a try with this page.