Sunday, 11. December 2005, 20:12:28
I touched on RSS News Aggregators in my last post, but wanted to spotlight a few that I wish to recommend. RSS News Aggregators are able to deliver the information down to your computer, so that you can keep track of which blogs and forums are being updated. Therefore you won't have to visit each one everyday. Also, if you are really lazy, you can even read the entire post in them. The Opera 8.51 browser has a feeds menu to keep track of the feeds you belong to. You can click on the RSS link to subscribe.
I know there are several stand alone RSS News Aggregators on Windows, and I remember Microsoft saying that RSS will be built into the next version, Vista.
On Mac OS X, I am currently trying out Newsfire, but I know there are many others as well.
Lastly Widgets are all the rage.
For Mac OS X Tiger, I recommend the News Reader 1.1 widget (pictured above).
For Windows or older version of Mac OS X, I recommend Konfabulator and the Combarss widget
(Note: To run Konfabulator, you must have Windows 2000 or XP).
Sunday, 11. December 2005, 19:47:41
Back in 1999, I created a Yahoo Group with my cousin and some friends of mine. A few years later we needed more features, so we moved over to MSN Groups. A year or two later, we decided that we needed to take the concept further and created a vBulletin forum board with a e107 front page. That was very successful in many ways and served us well, including the addition of many new members over the years.
Back in June 2005, I had an idea for how to take our Forum website to the next level. My idea was that everyone should have their own blog page with a central community as well. I struggled with getting a handle on the exact idea over the next few months, but couldn't really find anything that was close to what I had in mind.
That is until I discovered Opera Blogs and Groups a few weeks ago. I sat down last night and really research it and was totally impressed. This was IT. The idea that I had been searching for all these month.
One thing that really sold me also is the RSS feeds. I researched that as well in Opera 8.51 browser, as well as Newsfire aggregator for Mac OS X and News Reader 1.1 dashboard widget. I knew there were RSS news aggregators as well for all flavs of Windows, and through more research found a Combarss widget for Konfabulator. One of the goals was to find widgets for Mac and Windows, so that friends could check each other's blogs for new posts and not have to visit them everyday.
This certainly all looks promising so far...
WIDGETIZE