Web feed merging service
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Creating a composite feed helps you easily share your feeds with others
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THIS EDITION of NetSpeak focusses on a couple of new services created for helping you organise/access web feeds more efficiently and with ease.
We access hundreds of sites for a wide range of requirements that include professional, business and personal. To access the web content easily we subscribe to the web feeds of these sites. While subscribing to feeds available on our favorite sites, we do not usually keep them in any order. As we keep on subscribing to multiple feeds, over time, we may find even web feed based content access rather unwieldy.
We need a way to organise the feeds based on some criteria so that we can easily manage our ever-expanding web feed base. For instance, if we can cluster the feeds based on their utility or topic, we can access the required ones comfortably. The FeedShake service (http://www.feedshake.com/advend.php), creat- ed for helping you generate new feeds by combining several specified feeds will come quite handy in dealing with such needs. You can enter any number of feeds into the input box and in a short time the service will merge these feeds and present you the URL of the new composite feed.
So, if you use regularly a set of feeds for collecting the latest content related to your profession, you can combine all of them into one feed and call it say, `profession' (an example: http://feedshake.com/advfeed. php?code=wj2nm94twu.). You can add this URL into your web feed aggregator and start reading the content of all components.
An advantage of creating a composite feed in this manner is that it helps you easily share your feeds with others. Rather than sharing each feed in your pack separately, you can share the URL generated by FeedShake. Also, the service lets you filter out/in posts with keywords specified by you.
Generally, we read web feeds with an on-line or desktop newsreader. Perhaps, instead of reading them with a news aggregator, you would like to get them on your mailbox so that you can read them while checking e-mails. Several services that send you feed contents on to your mailbox are in place. Rmail (http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/rss2smtp.aspx) is one such product worth pointing to.
Another notable web feed based service worth a mention is the on-line news feed aggregator Feednation (http://www.feednation.com/). In addition to being used as an on-line news aggregator, Feednation allows you to receive the feeds in your e-mail box.
Yet another recent RSS related development is from Google. It has added the web feed aggregation feature on its `personalised home page service' (http://www.google.com/ig). To add a feed, access the `Add Content' button and select the option `Create Section.'
On-line office suite
To exploit the Net's `access from anywhere anytime' paradigm, several desktop applications are migrating towards it. The availability of high-speed links accelerates this trend. The on-line office-suite application, gOffice, developed for helping netizens create/store documents on-line with a browser, is the latest one in this genre.
gOffice (http://goffice.com/) features a web based word processor with several tools we generally find in popular word processing packages like MS-Word. It supports features such as spell check, editor with graphical interface and so on. The document created with the application can be saved as a PDF file on your local machine or can be sent to anyone as an e-mail attachment. As the document can also be saved on the gOffice's server, you can open/edit it from any place on the Net. Currently, on this web-based office suite, which is free for personal use, only the word processing component is implemented. Soon modules such as Worksheet and Presentations will be made available.
Newspaper podcasting
In one of the past editions, NetSpeak featured a few radio stations that publish content as podcasts (downloadable audio content distributed through news feeds). It seems, the podcast technology is all set to conquer even the newspaper industry.
To familiarise yourself with this trend, have a look at the on-line edition of San Francisco Chronicle (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/indexn? blogid=5), where you can find the audio version of some of its news stories.
If interested in a dictionary/thesaurus for your desktop, download/install the free English dictionary software available at: http://www.sequence publishing.com/thesage.html. Apart from providing you with the meaning of any English word, the software gives you its synonyms, antonyms, anagrams and so on.
Also, this feature-packed software presents several examples of usage of the word.
My favourite word
It is likely that a few words have become your favourites. Perhaps a word has become your favourite due to some historical factors.
Have a look at the on-line service `MyFavourite Word' (http://www.myfavoriteword. com/), where you can enter the details of your favourite words. If you scan through its database, you will find several very interesting/meaningful words like `Abstemiously,' a word with all the vowels in alphabetical order.
A reminder program
As we get completely engrossed in our work on a computer, we may forget important appointments, events and so on. A program that works in the background and reminds us of important events at specified times will help us a lot. The software, SwizzTool (http://www.specop.se/) is one such product. Apart from helping you set-up reminder alerts, this program lets you do such tasks as assigning hotkeys to programs, invoking a Google search on the string stored on clipboard and so on.
A tutorial site
Numerous discussion forums and tutorials on a wide array of subjects that help you become better at what you do are available on-line.
The programmingtutorials.com (http://www.pro grammingtutorials.com/), the web portal with links to over three hundred programming language tutorials, is an excellent service worth a visit
J. MURALI
E-mail the author at: jmurali@gmail.com
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