Don’t know what RSS is? It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it lets you read all your favourite blogs and news sites from one place by pulling content from them. That means you don’t need to keep visiting tons of websites to check for new content.

RSS Feeds have rapidly replaced the old ‘email newsletter’ as a way to communicate with people who are interested in your website. And they work as an update announcement every time you add or change something on a site – For that reason they work particularly well with sites that have content in small chunks like blogs etc

Here is a short video that explains RSS in plain English and helps you get started:

RSS Feeds have rapidly replaced the old ‘email newsletter’ as a way to communicate with people who are interested in your website. And they work as an update announcement every time you add or change something on a site – For that reason they work particularly well with sites that have content in small chunks like blogs etc. Really savvy operators, like say the Mulligrubs website, offer a way to subscribe to updates via either RSS or email

Subscribing to RSS feeds will be discussed at this weeks Mullies meeting along with lots of other items of interest plus the usual Q&A - See you there :)

Notes:
Idea for the post and initial text and video link found at the Digsby Blog

A more technical description of RSS from Wikipedia

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format.^[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",^[3] or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favoured websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's URI into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats: "Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)", "RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)", or "Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)".

RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999,^[4] the RSS icon ("") first gained widespread use in 2005–2006.

I use Google apps for the hosting of domains and email for my Domains. Considering it is completely free (there is a paid Pro version) it is amazing functionality. As we have a fair few subscribers to emails for a small list I was wondering how many emails I can send per day. Most email hosts have some limits in force – mostly to stop abuse by spammers and the like.

Below is details of what Google Apps allows. Again for a free service I think this is excellent.

Details from this Google Group Page

Here is a list of some of the sending limits in place on your account:

- 500 messages per day (i.e., you can hit 'Send' a maximum of 500
times)
- 500 unique recipients
- 2000 total emails (for example, you could send one message to a
group of 500 people four times)

Please note that there may be additional factors which slightly raise
or lower these limits, but this should be a good general guideline.

Sincerely,

Joanna
The Google Apps Team

Reading ebooks is a fantastic way to save money. You can find text/ebook copies of even current bestsellers online. For ‘official’ versions of new books you need to pay but there are lots of copies available free if you know where to look – torrents, filesharing sites such as Rapidshare and the like. Of course some of these are of questionable legality and maybe associated with virus/spyware so check you moral compass and check your security.

These texts can be read on your computer screen, on your phone or PDA or even on one of the new generation fancy ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle (pictured)

 

Personally I probably spend too much time in front of a computer already. But I do have a bunch of Computer ebooks I use for reference material. 
Just think if you took out the pictures and maps the text of say the Encyclopedia Britannica would probably fit on a floppy drive AND be searchable! Amazing really

This post was found at Make Use Of

You might be surprised by how many good free ebook sites there are out there. Nowadays, you can find pretty much any popular (and not) book online. You just need to know where to look. Here are my favourite free ebook sites.

1. Ebook Search Engines

These are simple Google-like search engines but for PDF files. I usually start my ebook search using one of these sites. Type in the title of the document or book name you’re looking for and click on the search button. Find your book in the search results and click on download link. Done.

So far my top 3 ebook search sites are:

www.pdfgeni.com (MakeUseOf review)
www.pdf-search-engine.com (MakeUseOf review)
www.data-sheet.net (MakeUseOf review)

2. Scribd.com

In case you have never heard of this one before, the simplest way to define Scribd would be to call it Youtube for documents. People can upload whatever text documents they want and easily share them with others.

You’ll find lots and lots of free ebooks here. You only need to know what to look for. For instance try searching for George Orwell, Leo Tolstoi, etc.

And obviously it gets copyrighted ebooks much like YouTube gets copyrighted videos. I am not sure if they are doing anything to deal with them, but the fact is there are plenty of them on Scribd.

Oh and as we have mentioned before, Scribd is also an excellent resource for free document templates.

3. Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg (aka PG) has the largest collection of public domain books. These are the books that out of copyright and available for anyone to use for any purpose. Lots of books from the world’s greatest fiction authors such as Dickens, Joyce, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Anton Chekov and Edgar Allan Poe fall into this category.

This site is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. PG is an extremely popular site and now has over 20,000 works. If you’re not sure where to start check out their Top 100 page.

4. Free Ebooks For Your iPod, PDA, Smartphone, Blackberry etc.

For those of you who like to have ebooks on their portabe device we got some sites as well. Below are what I believe the best websites for books that can be read on mobile devices.

www.gutenberg.org
www.manybooks.net (MakeUseOf Review)
www.feedbooks.com (MakeUseOf Review)
www.booksinmyphone.com (MakeUseOf Review)

For iPhone users in particular there is a website called TextOnPhne. It’s a great ebook site that comes with its own ebook reader app. There are over 30,000 free books for your Apple device. Check out the demo video here.

5. Free Tech Ebooks

These sites are mainly for tech books, covering everything from computer science, engineering and mathematics to programming and web development.

www.freecomputerbooks.com
www.freetechbooks.com
www.onlinecomputerbooks.com

(Bonus) DailyLit

DailyLit is a bit different from the rest but I really like what they’re doing there. DailyLit can deliver a small excerpt from the book of your choice to your email on a daily basis. One excerpt per day, and so untill the book is finished.

The reason it wroks so well is that it only takes around 3-5 minutes to read each excerpt. If you feel like reading more you can request a next excerpt with a click of a button.

While more than a half of all books cost about $4.95 per book others are free. There are plenty of good titles among the free ones as well, some of my favorites include My Life and Work (by Henry Ford), Siddhartha (by Herman Hesse) and Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (by John D. Rockefeller). Check it out.

We have discussed web searching tricks in the past here. All good search engines and Google in particular offer lots of ways to customise your searches to filter out irrelevant information and hone in on just what you want to know.

I found a YouTube video today (via Digital Inspiration) that explains some of the basics.
(Being YouTube it should work with any connection but will  be slow on Dial Up)