E-Musings Mon Immorata

Getting Your Daily Info Dose Too much spam, too many false positives afflicting email newsletter delivery sees surge in RSS feed readers. The rise of the news feed utility come on the heels of an ever increasing spam mail deluge. Against which most defenses seem very knee-jerk. Like blocking messages based on (vague) rule sets. Or targeting mail with HTML code or more than a one hyperlink. Of supposed spam-like words. Of sender authentication before delivery. Of deleting messages from a single source that are delivered near-simultaneously into multiple mailboxes on a single host. My classification of anti-spam methods is harsh. But if they are successful why does the quantum of junk mail delivered increase instead of decreasing? Even as legitimate opt-in mail's classified as junk and deleted before it even reach a subscriber's mailbox. It's really strange that in spite of precautions junk's delivered. Evidently the filtering used sucks! For example the weekly column I pen for an Internet E-zine experienced delayed submissions. I found messages vanishing into the ether. And eventually figured out they were targeted because of their content that included keywords like virus, spam, junk and the like! This quiet elimination (where no message ever bounced) was caused by an extreme mail filter. I finally resolved the problem by sending my submissions by email with the column as a text attachment. For the past 14 months I have be opting out of most email news letters. Preferring to decide when and how I want to be updated. At one level it was a solution to information overload. All those messages piling unread in my inbox. Now RSS (Really Simple Syndication; Rich Site Summary) feeds deliver information at my convenience. Email is push technology. RSS' pull on demand. In the former content is broadcast regardless of whether the recipient is prepared for the delivery frequency and format (text, HTML). With RSS a reader decides what they want to subscribe to and the update refresh frequency. Although the content received is formatted, the RSS news aggregator handles the parsing and displays the feeds as a collection of hyperlinks. So what are news aggregator and how do they differ from news readers? In the purest Net sense, news readers were used to access multiple messages on Internet news servers and in Usenet. News aggregators download summarized content from a source site and display it in a web page-like document. However, aggregators are commonly referred to today as news readers. And software like Mozilla, Thunderbird and Opera that can access email, news groups and RSS feeds have all but blurred the differences between the two. Blogs like this one have made RSS so commonplace. A typical feed includes the article (posting) title with a short descriptive summary and link to the complete article. Web sites storing content in a database can easily offer RSS feeds. There's scripting techniques for PHP, ASP, .Net (dot net), Perl and Python. You can also learn how to develop RSS feeds. Static (manually updated) web sites don't need to feel left out. Use Blogify Your Page to manually add content details before generating an XML-formatted feed file. Of course every time you update the site you need to update the feed too. If you prefer to read feeds in your web browser, Opera M2 mail and news client also includes a feed reader. Internet Explorer has Pluck (which I haven't used at all). Firefox supports Live Bookmarks added direct to the browser for sites supporting this feature. Or you can use one of the many news readers extensions. These use the browser's bookmark manager to manage feeds.

I experimented with Sage but found its interface rather limited. Although this very simplicity may lie in Sage's appeal. Whizz RSS news reader is detailed. But requires users to register and overall its interface is intimidating.

I finally settled on Habari Xenu which is nearly as easy to use and update as Feed Demon (and just happens to be developed by an Indian). There are lots of free and shareware RSS news readers. Some just display information. Others directly interface with blogging tools. The best list is at Google Directory. The best all-in-one application (email, new groups, RSS) is Mozilla Thunderbird. But using it only as an RSS reader is over kill. One of the best dedicated applications is Bradsoft's Feed Demon. This includes a large collection of gold-plated feeds covering everything from business news, through humor and on to technology. Demon is really easy to setup and use, includes its own tabbed web browser. Supports the OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) standard. And can export and import feeds. The Newspaper contains favorite feeds. Watches track items based on keywords. News Bin stores favored items for future reference. The latest version also interfaces with RSS search engines to discover new feeds. Synop's SauceReader (requires .Net Framework 1.x) is free for educational and personal use. Although it uses an Outlook 2003-style interface it doesn't integrate with Outlook itself. Besides OPML support, there's auto-discovery of new feeds and search of archived ones. SauceReader doubles as a blog posting tool that works with most blogging APIs (application programming interface). It also integrates with MSN Messenger (although I haven't used this feature). There's also RSS Owl, a Java-based news aggregator (needs Java Runtime Engine). It supports RSS, RDF and Atom feeds. And can export news to PDF, RTF and HTML. Besides support for OPML import and export, there's integrated feed search and validation. RSSOwl is Sourceforge Project of the Month for January 2005. RSS Bandit is an advanced aggregator. You can synchronize feeds using WebDAV, FTP and file shares: invaluable if you share collections across several computers. You can also configure how long feeds are displayed before being marked as read and archive specific items for later retrieval. In RSS Bandit Feed auto-discovery is standard. You can read posting comments for blog sites supporting wfw:commentRss and can also post your own feedback to sites supporting CommentAPI. There's embedded web browser supporting tabbed browsing. As well as integrated Google, Feedster and MSN search.

And finally, Total Commander 6.50 has been released. Its plug-in support has improved. Content plug-ins are a new feature. And you can auto-install plug-ins. There's also new folder thumbnail view (Ctrl+Shift+F1). As well as an enhanced search feature that also can search plugins for specific features. I find Total Commender's search function faster, more advanced and flexible that even Windows XP Search. A great resource for content, file system and Lister (the integrated file viewer) plugins is TotalCmd.Net. That's it for this week. Stay Safe until the next time. Click Here to Email Me