E-Musings Mon Immorata

Email's time may be over but RSS ensures you don't lack for information OK, OK, I jumped on the RSS bandwagon rather later. I think my personal experience with not being able to configure an RSS feed for my personal blog may have overly colored my opinion about it. This despite longtime-fan Ankur bombarding me for over 2 months with all kinds of RSS-related information interesting. For those still not with the program, RSS (Rich Site Summary aka RDF Site Summary) is an XML format developed by Netscape that's used to syndicate Web content. Suppose I wanted to make this column available to other sites, I could choose what sections were available for syndication, then publish them using a custom-built RSS script. The possibilities are enormous with the average choice today being news feeds, event information, project updates, published content and corporate data. RSS focuses on pull technology where the client makes an information request from the host. In email, its push technology that broadcasts a message regardless of the destination client's ability to accept or process the data sent. Unfortunately, the global upsurge in spam messages has resulted in the use of often inexpert filtering. That 9 instances out of 10 will reject or tag a genuine mail as spam. This often has a cascade effect with either the source message being deleted on the server in extreme cases, or rejected as undeliverable. It could also be routed to a junk mail box (common on Web-based mail services) that most users don't even look at any more. And the few messages that do manage to traverse all these dangerous pathways and pipelines, often fall victim of desktop-computer spam killers. Just a few lucky ones are actually delivered into your Inbox. Even the mail re-director service I use for my primary mail is anything but foolproof. It has tagged mail I expressively signed up for on the basis of the originating mail server belonging to a spam-tainted cluster, to an ISP notorious for sending spam, or for being a bit too aggressive in the content of message body! This all and nothing approach does allow me to check mail wrongly tagged as spam. But the process is tedious and only seems to work for a single month. Then the filters appear to reset themselves. As a consumer you are merely irritated that mail you depend on for information and knowledge updates isn't delivered. But what about the hapless publisher who more often than not remains in the dark. And a mail delivery receipt is not an option. Trust me! All it needs is one standards-non-compliant mail server to break the chain. Publishers are turning to RSS which uses either Perl. Or XML to format a page than when parsed by an RSS reader pulls information from a data store (or database) and presents it in a Webpage-like format. Since RSS uses pull technology where the client has to intentionally order the server to make available content, the risk of spam is reduced to zero. And no, Dorothy, RSS is not the same as news groups which are a collection of mailing lists where the messages are arranged by topic (subject). Even the clients used to view and post messages to news groups have more in common with email than RSS. Tools of the Trade Having recently jumped on the RSS bandwagon, I naturally checked out the two best RSS readers. FeedReader is an open-source software (last updated in April 2003) that verges on the simplistic. A more advanced version is FeedDemon (currently in time-limited Beta versions) from Nick Bradbury. Nick originally owned Alliare Corporation that used to sell Homesite; the first HTML editor. Alliare was later acquired by Macromedia whose DreamWeaverMX is still largely based on the original Homesite code. Nick also developed TopStyle, a CSS WYSIWYG editor. The free FeedReader is in a state of arrested development with no updates since April 2003. The developer seems to have washed his hands of the project citing a lack of time. That said, the interface is exceeding simple but you need to manually add (subscribe to) RSS feeds. FeedDemon is a good tool for both beginners and advanced users. This neat tool is laid out like Outlook Express with a channel bar listing RSS channels available on the left. Clicking on a channel displays its contents in the upper window on the right (where OE displays messages received). Clicking an RSS feed displays its contents in the preview pane below. This information is usually just a brief line with hyperlinks to online content or a complete article. And the best part about both RSS readers is you don't need to open a Web browser to view online content. It open within the preview pane. What I especially liked about FeedDemon was its ability to define favorite feeds called News Bins. All you need to do is right-click a displayed feed to mark it for a News Bin. There's also a set of built-in font and display styles so you can customize the feed preview. And its very easy to add new channels, and update existing ones. One day, Nick will become unkind and make us pay for this tool. But until then enjoy! ] And if you don't mind paying $30 but want to use Outlook as a mail client, plus a news and RSS reader, get NewsGator (2 MB, Windows 98/2k/XP, 14-day trial). NewsGator needs the .NET framework installed as well. Right Outlook uses Outlook Express to view news groups. Free, Fast, Storage Device But it's all thanks to an RSS feed from Lockergnome that I learned about a free RAMDisk add-in for Windows 2000/XP. Christiaan Ghijselinck has developed a software-based RAMDisk from an existing Microsoft proof-of-concept utility. The core difference is Microsoft's version is difficult to configure. Of course Christiaan Ghijselinck's version forces a system restart when you change the disk size. But you get up to 64 MB of disk space. If you want more you have to either pay anything upwards of $10. Or struggle with Microsoft's version. Why a RAMDisk? Well, readers who grew up on a diet of DOS will remember how fast they were. And how often system recovery tools would setup, then load themselves into a RAM disk so that they could work on the primary (boot) drive without being affected by anything -- viruses, disk damage -- plaguing it. Actually, installing both Windows 2000 and XP writes a compressed copy of the setup files into a RAMDisk. There's more on the efficacies of RAMDisks here. I use my RamDisk (configured to 32 MB) as a scratch disk for both Photoshop, as well as for the IE browser cache. The disk throughput is incredibly (when compared to conventional solid state media) fast. I recently tried a CD burn test using a 5 MB test file with Windows XP's CD writing software. Writing a CD session from hard drive took about 75 seconds while from the RAMDisk took less than 57 seconds! The only disadvantages with RAMDisks are their contents are volatile and the disk is erased when the computer shuts down or restarts. The RAMDisk size is a bite taken out of your installed memory. It's fine with 256 MB or higher systems, but I advise against if for 128 MB computers with Windows 2000/XP installed. So get your copy now (667 kB, Windows 2k/XP/2003 Server, free) That's it for this week. Stay Safe! Click Here to Email Me