Summersault provided a $5,000 grant to Morrisson-Reeves Library for the funding of the series in 2007 as a part of celebrating its 10 year anniversary. The Library and Summersault worked closely to create sessions with topics that will engage local citizens about various technology issues and tools, including politics, home networking, renewable energy, databases, online auctions, and Linux on the desktop. Each session features a presentation by a local expert, along with question and answer time.

“When we first made the contribution to the library, we asked them to think about how they could best use it to enhance technology education in our community,” said Chris Hardie, Summersault’s Principal. “We’re very pleased with the program they’ve put together, and we hope that it can contribute in some way to the learning opportunities available here.”

A full schedule of the sessions can be found on the Morrisson-Reeves website or by calling the Library at (765) 966-8291.

Summersault, LLC is a leader in database driven web solutions. The Richmond, Indiana based firm offers a single point of contact for highly customized web design and application development solutions, as well as professional consulting services and support.

At Summersault, when we develop software applications, beta is certainly one of the stages that the software goes through, but it’s not a stage we would ever turn the public loose on. Generally speaking, here are the stages of our software life-cycle:

• Pre-alpha: software in this stage is still actively being written, and like anything else that is only half-formed, it is not expected to work or even make sense to anyone except the person(s) building it.
• Alpha: software in this stage is ready for internal review and testing, but is still expected to have bugs and refinements to be addressed.
• Beta: software in this stage is ready for testing and review by people who know they are using a test version of the software, and who are knowledgeable about how best to test to make sure it’s working correctly in all aspects. While bugs and refinements are still possible, the goal for beta software is to have those be minimal.
• Production: software in this stage is ready for use by the public (or whomever the intended user base is), and its expected to have no issues that affect the user experience.

These labels and stages are fairly common within any given sector of software development. Historically, a software developer would rarely consider anything but “production” software to be suitable for use by the public. With the advent of web-based applications that can be deployed, refined, and redeployed quickly and with minimal overhead (no CD-ROMS or diskettes to ship, user manuals to reprint, etc.), that convention is changing. One of the best examples is Google and their industry-changing web services like Gmail and Google Calendar. Both are officially in “beta” (even the graphic at the top of every page says so), and yet people are using these services every day to manage critical functions of their lives (e-mail communications and time scheduling/todo lists, respectively) as if they are “in production.”

So what does it mean to depend on beta-quality software for critical uses? What should you expect from Google and other software providers who openly acknowledge that the software they’re putting out there for you to use isn’t yet production-worthy? In particular:

• What known bugs and problems exist in the software that keep it from being production-worthy?
• What are the chances of data loss (e.g. all of your e-mail disappears), and if data loss does occur, does the software provider intend to try to get it back?
• Are there areas of security and privacy that may not be as fully tested or refined as they will be later, and what concerns should someone using the software have about those issues?

There are obviously many more similar kinds of questions you could ask depending on the particular piece of software (e.g., “is Gmail’s spam filtering mechanism also considered beta, or is it just the software tool as a whole?” or “when Google Calendar comes out of beta, will Google charge for usage of it beyond a certain number of calendars/events/etc?”) But hopefully you can see the point: the label of “beta” software can mean different things in different situations, but it generally always means “not quite ready for production use.” I think it may not be the best thing that prominent software developers are desensitizing users to that fact, and the possible consequences that come with it.

So if you’re using beta software in your life, make sure you know what the liabilities and issues might be. And if you’re looking at software developers to create a web application for you, make sure they know the difference between the different stages of the software life cycle, and why they matter in creating quality.

Prism is still currently considered a prototype because it is under development by Mozilla Labs, but it seems to function quite well. I used it to access our VOIP-powered phone call routing panel at work and my Remember the Milk to-do list at home. It has resulted in a significant reduction of frustration caused by misplaced or closed browser windows and reduces the time it takes to reach my information because it is available at the click of a button on my desktop.

Getting Prism
Prism is very easy to use and available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux users. To start using Prism, simply download the appropriate version and install it on your computer. (Eventually, Mozilla hopes to integrate Prism into Firefox so you don’t even have to download and install a new program, but for now, it is still necessary.)

Once Prism is installed, start the program, and it will display an Install Web Application window.
Enter the URL of the application you want to use, a name for the application , and the locations you would like shortcuts to appear. Then click OK , and Prism will create shortcuts in the locations you specified and start the application.

For anyone who regularly uses web applications as a part of their work flow or daily life, Prism is a great solution for bridging the gap between web applications and desktop applications.

Fortunately, Leopard’s new firewall actually made the task very easy and intuitive. This was due to the firewall’s application-level control, an extremely handy feature whose usefulness I’d overlooked when I read all the doom and gloom back in October. Once I got the Amanda binaries working again after the upgrade, I knew we’d need to make an exception in the firewall to allow the sendbackup process to access the Amanda client machine. Just as a test, I went ahead and tried a back-up test from the Amanda server, knowing the client machine’s firewall would block the connection. As expected, the back-up check failed as the Amanda server was not able to connect to the client machine. However, when I checked Leopard’s firewall panel, I was very pleased to see that it had automatically detected the connection attempt, and allowing the sendbackup process through the firewall was as simple as toggling the menu from Block incoming connections to Allow incoming connections. That was it! No need to enter port ranges in the firewall and recompile the Amanda client software to force it to use only ports in those ranges. I just let the firewall notice the application trying to connect, and then in one click allowed the process through—nice, simple, and intuitive.

So, consider that a big thumbs up for application-level control in Leopard’s new firewall.

As others have noted, the preferred way to do an OS X upgrade is to use the “Archive and Install” option, which basically moves user files and preferences to a safe place, gets the old operating system out of the way (but keeps it around just in case), and puts the new one in place. This is better than doing an upgrade that only touches files that have been changed between versions and leaves everything else in place, because it insures you’ll have a “clean” system, at least at the operating system level. So, I did that, and the upgrade process itself went smoothly, again taking about 45 minutes.

One of the preparation items I did was to create a new temporary user account with administrator privileges, which I logged into post-upgrade to see how things worked before logging into my *real* account. The logic here is that if there is some major problem with the new OS or its applications, I’ll avoid messing with any of my critical user files which might be updated as soon as I login for the first time. I also used this temporary admin account to install the 10.5.1 software update.

And that was where I hit the first and only major snag so far. Leopard uses a new technique for installing software updates that require a reboot – it asks you to reboot your computer first, and then processes the updates when the system comes back up (whereas previously it would process the updates during the existing login session, and then reboot into a new login prompt). When the system rebooted in its attempt to install 10.5.1, somewhere at the end of the processing (I didn’t see because I was sautéing mushrooms in the kitcehn), it had a kernel panic. This was quite disconcerting, but when I restarted the system, everything came up properly, the OS reports itself as being version 10.5.1, and I haven’t had any problems since. We’ll see if that continues.

Beyond that, the Leopard upgrader pretty much takes care of getting the system back to a usable state with all of your critical settings in place. It did leave a few things out:

• Printer Profiles – as with Tiger, an Archive & Install doesn’t carry over the printer profiles setup with the previous operating system. I wonder if it’s just too complex to do, or if they haven’t bothered yet, figuring most people only have one printer attached to their system with fairly generic drivers. For me, it’s somewhat of a pain becaus there are at least three printers I regularly use, and for all of them I have multiple print settings saved – all of that now needs to be recreated, installed from driver disks, etc.
• Contents of /usr/local/bin – I use the Enigmail extension for my mail program, Thunderbird, to handle encrypting and decrypting messages. *It* still works fine, but the underlying encryption program it relies on, gpg, did not. When I looked into it, it seems that the gpg program (along with a few others I depend on) had been installed in a directory “/usr/local/bin” on my old system, and Leopard didn’t copy that over. I did that manually:
  

  # mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
  # cp -p /Previous\ Systems.localized/2007-12-15_1457/usr/local/bin/* /usr/local/bin/

  and that seems to have taken care of it.

There were just a few other minor issues that I’ve noticed so far:

• In Tiger, I had a folder on my desktop full of aliases to frequently used applications. Further, I created a link to that folder in my Dock so that I could easily browse the available programs by cilck-and-holding on the folder icon in the Dock. The notion of “stacks” has formalized that behavior in Leopard, but apparently the Stack uses the first icon in the folder as its Dock icon, instead of the icon for the folder itself. Some folks have already put together a workaround that involves a weird little transparency overlay icon and that’s been fine, but it would be nice if the OS supported the more intuitive behavior.
• A few times now, usually when messing with network settings, I’ve been asked to enter the password for the “login” keychain. I’ve tried my usual admin account password (usually because I didn’t notice that it was asking for something else), and that hasn’t worked. In every case, as my password tries expired, the system continued on doing what it was doing and didn’t complain further, so I’m hoping and assuming that it hasn’t prevented my changes from taking effect. But it is still annoying, and hard to believe that it doesn’t represent some deeper issue I’ll have to deal with eventually.

Now, on to some of the good stuff I’ve been experiencing as a result of the upgrade:

• The OS feels faster. I didn’t expect this – usually, operating system upgrades imply at least a mild case of featuritis, where flashy new things are prioritized over speed and stability. But in the case of Leopard, the interface is more responsive, applications open more quickly, Spotlight returns search results more quickly and accurately, and things just generally seem zippier. We’ll see how long it lasts.
• My applications run faster. This is worth highlighting on its own because one of the tools I spend much of my work day with, the Mozilla Firefox web browser, is *so* much faster on Leopard than it was on Tiger. I mean, web pages that I thought were just plain slow before are coming right up. Tab switching, dynamic component (such as Flash players) loading, and scrolling are also clearly much faster. Again, not at all expected, and very much appreciated.
• Spaces is excellent. Apple’s virtual desktop solution is not only on par with how the X-Windows system in Unix has been doing this for many years, they’ve added their usual dash of interface innovation and improvements. There have been some software apps for doing this in OS X for some time now, but they always felt slow to me, or too far on the outside of what the rest of the OS was doing. With Spaces, I feel more productive already.
• The Finder improvements are nice. Not amazing, but nice. In most cases, the positive changes are ones of simplification – more consistency, fewer things to mess with, more obvious ways to manipulate the files and folders. (The exception to simplification is the integration of the “cover flow” view into the Finder windows, and so far I’ve found it totally gratuitous…I’m sure the marketing folks at Apple are pleased, though, as it looks pretty.) The Spotlight searching system is more integrated into other places where you might search for something, so there’s definitely a convergence there that’s appreciated.
• Safari 3.0 is sweet. Though I’ll probably continue to use Firefox for the forseeable future because of its extension architecture, Safar is definitely a whole new world of fun and sleekness in web browsing. The one feature I think I *will* use extensively is the “Web Clips” integration with the OS X Dashboard, where you can basically tell it to show a small clip of a given web page as a standalone “widget.” As a system administrator who tries to keep an eye on various graphs and monitoring systems, having one-click/one-key access to these without pulling up a whole web page will be great.

Well, that’s the report so far on my upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. Mac OS X 10.5(.1) is certainly a visually-oriented update to the already highly functional and appealing interface, but the speed improvements alone have made it worthwhile for me.

If you’re taking the plunge and have any of your own experiences to report, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Here are five tips I use to get the most productivity out of Thunderbird.

1. Use Filtering

When it comes down to why I decided pursue alternatives it came down to one feature: Easier filtering. I got too many “action alerts” in my Inbox. Although the sender may advocate that I should Save the Environment today, In my organizational scheme I’d really prefer to save their critical message in another folder, and save the environment tomorrow.

Create a “bulk” folder as alternate inbox for impersonal mail you don’t need to see immediately. Then the next time you get an alert that your donation is needed immediately, right click the e-mail address that the message is from. You’ll find an option to create a filter based on that address. Easy.

Tip two further extends the power of easy filtering.

2. Use Labels

Thunderbird 1.5 allows you to label a message with one of five labels, and each label changes the color of the title in your Inbox, adding a visual cue. By default the labels are: Important, Work, Personal, To Do, and Later.

Quickly label a message using the keys 1 through 5 on the keyboard, or 0 to “unlabel” a message. Learning which key goes with which label will quickly pay off.

For maximum benefit, combine the use of labels with the with the custom views that Thunderbird lets you create. I created a View created called “Work”, which expresses “Show me all the messages that are Unread, or labeled as Important, To Do or Work”. These tend to be the critical things I need to give attention to, and narrows what I see in my Inbox from over 100 messages to about 10.

Further automate the benefit of labels by combining them with the filter feature. Create filters to mark messages from particular senders as “Personal” to further reduce distraction at work.

As icing, Thunderbird lets you combine a custom view with search terms to further narrow the display of what’s shown. I can select the custom Work view, and then search within that for ones from Chris.

Thunderbird 2.0 will provider further enhance support for labels.

3. Install Keyboard-friendly extensions

It is nearly always faster to accomplish a computer task using only the keyboard, if good shortcuts are available. Try this first extension and I think you’ll agree!

• Nostalgy adds two critical shortcuts that allow you to move or save to a folder by typing parting of the name. As you type, it shows you all possible matching folder names. This can be much faster than using Drag-N-Drop with the keyboard. It also reduces the need to keep the folder pane visible all the time. After contacting the author, an additional helpful feature was addeded for the 0.1.5. release. Now “l” toggles if the folder list is hidden or shown. See the “About” screen for the full shortcut list.

• The External Editor Extension allows you to do more complex formatting using a text editor. I use the following syntax to launch the Vim editor in a terminal, which is faster than loading the graphical Gvim:

  /usr/bin/konsole --noframe --nomenubar --noscrollbar --notabbar --vt_sz=90x40 -e /bin/vim -e /bin/vim
  

  If you don’t currently use a text editor, consider Bram Moolenaar’s Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing as an introduction.

• The Headers Toggle extension adds a single useful shortcut totoggle viewing the full message headers. Use it when you get bcc’ed on a message and want to check which address of yours the the mail was actually delivered to.
• Finally, the Display Mail User Agent is mostly for fun, recommended to make e-mail a tad more personal. It displays an icon the message for the e-mail program (or “user agent”) that the sender is using. This tells you a little bit about about the person at a glance. Like e-mail address itself, it provides a hint about the person you are dealing with.

4. Master Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts to use in Thunderbird’s message composition window were not easily found now from Googling. Remembering just a few of these commands is a faster alternative to loading an external editor, if they are all you need. The following provides quick and intuitive ways to move around the message window, possibly selecting text to cut or delete in the process.

A typical flow is to quickly highlight everything below the current point and delete it, to get rid of old message context that’s no longer needed.

Here’s another keyboard-based workflow that’s very handy. It allows you to quickly take action on a group of messages:

• Notice a lot of automated messages with the word “warning” in them.
• Control-K to search for “warning”
• Tab to move to message index
• Control-A to select all messages
• Del to delete them all
• Control-K to return to search box
• Del to clear the search box
• Tab to return the message index

A quick test of my own revealed it was was about 33% faster to use only they keyboard than to also use the mouse. (About 12 seconds versus 18). Stacking up these micro-efficiencies throughout a workday full of e-mail makes a noticeable difference. I find I’m less frustrated with my tools when they help me to complete a task nearly as fast as I can think it through!

Mozilla has a helpful, if incomplete, reference of other possible keyboard shortcuts for Thunderbird.

5. Solve the Desktop / Laptop synchronization problem

I store my mail in IMAP folders on a central IMAP server, so I can easily access it from home or work. However, I wanted a complete synchronization, including the address book, preferences and extensions.

Without this, there would be at least slight differences between the two contexts, and those differences would drive me nuts. Because it would look 98% percent the same, it would be difficult to remember which change existed where. Changing everything in two places would be a drag.

Enter Unison, a file synchronizer that works on Linux, Mac and Windows. Unison is a possible solution for me because my work machine stays on continuously and is accessible via SSH. If you one of machines is not available like this, consider Portable Thunderbird instead.

I use this relatively simple unison profile to tell it to synchronize my “.thunderbird” folder, except for IMAP cache folders, which I know I don’t need because the mail is stored on a central server:

# The contents of ~/.unison/thunderbird.prf
root      = /home/mark/.thunderbird/
root      = ssh:mark@my.workmachine.comhome/mark/.thunderbird
ignore    = Name ImapMail

There is only one “gotcha” about this. Filtering rules are stored in the ImapMail folder, in a file named “msgFilterRules.dat”. That can be solved that by moving the file out of the ImapMail folder, and replacing it with a symbolic link to the moved file. This way, the file still gets synchronized because it’s outside the ImapMail folder, but Thunderbird can still find it through the symbolic link which has been created in the folder on both machines.

When I come home from work, I run Unison to sychronize any changes from work. Then before I return to work, I run unison again to sync my change from laptop to my work desktop again. Although Unison runs a typical graphical application, the fastest way to sync is run it on command-line in batch mode:

unison -batch -ui=text thunderbird

That saves the time of loading the graphical interface, as well as skipping the confirmation
step and starting immediately.

If I forget to sychronize once, nothing explodes. I can still get all e-mail from other the location because IMAP is still the primary synchronization tool . At some points I have made different changes to in both places before I sync again. Unison will ask what to do if it’s not sure which file is authoritative in this case. In these cases I have always had success in choosing all the files from one copy or another to be authorizative. That seems most likely to produce a consistent state.

It may be necessary to use different outgoing mail servers for home and work. To reduce spam, mail servers often only accept mail from their own networks. To address this, install the SmtpSelect extension. It provides a “Select SMTP” button which you can add to the toolbar. Now, switching outgoing mail servers is just a click away.

In Conclusion

I started this project skeptical that any graphical e-mail program could rival Mutt for performance and efficiency, not to mention the simplicity of accessing it anywhere through a text-based console.

While my setup with Thunderbird is more complex, it offers a number of new workflow improvements, especially easier filtering and labels. Thunderbird is an excellent e-mail program that new users can learn easily, and power-users may be surprised they appreciate.

Updates

July 29th, 2006 – I changed the recommended external editor from Xterm to Konsole. Copy/Paste in Xterm is broken because it doesn’t allow you to paste the “normal” clipboard, only the selection. Gnome-terminal 2.10 won’t work because this syntax wasn’t supported: gnome-terminal -e vim file.txt. However gnome-terminal has a more sensible paste shortcut– “Contrl-Shift V”, so I updated Konsole to use the that shortcut, too.

Flash video depends only on the Flash plugin, which nearly everyone has, is well supported on Linux and seems to generally “just work”. There also seems to be a lot of flexibility to integrate the player with the design of a particular website, which is a nice feature for developers.

Finally, Flash video is nice for the smaller file sizes of the video format. For example, converting my AVI file to the FLV format reduced the file size by about 75%!

I was pleased to find that there are already free, open source tools that allow me to publish content in the FLV using Linux. (But I believe the same tools could also work on Mac and Windows and provide some pointers for those platforms at the bottom.)

The software I used was ffmpeg, flvtool and FlowPlayer.

ffmpeg is a command line graphics converter that packaged for popular Linux distributions. However, the version available for Mandriva 2006 did not produce any sound in the output file. To get that to work, I had to compile my own version from CVS. Since I already had some of the things I needed installed to complete that process, my process went like this terminal session run as root:

# Un-install the ffmpeg I tried from Mandriva 2006
$ urpme ffmpeg
$ urpmi liblame0-devel
$ cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co ffmpeg
$ cd ffmpeg
$ ./configure --enable-mp3lame
$ make

$  checkinstall --install=yes

Your Mileage May Vary.

The last step could have been just make install, but using checkinstall checkinstall is recommended over just “make install” because it creates a formal package that you can easily uninstall. It will prompt you for some optional information, like a version number. For best results, specify a version number higher than the version of ffmpeg you have installed, if any.

flvtool2 is another command line tool requires the Ruby package to be installed, but can be run directly where you unpack the “.tar.gz” archive. (No special installation is needed). Its purpose in the the process is to update the file with some metadata needed to play it.

Finally, FlowPlayer is a very easy to use Flash Video player. While I won’t repeat their instructions, basically you can copy and paste some HTML and change an example file name to be the one of your file.

With the software installed, here are the actual commands I used to create an FLV file from an AVI file on my digital camera:

$ cd ~/Videos
$ ffmpeg -i orig.avi out.flv

$ cd ~/Applications/flvtool
$ ./flvtool2 -U ~/Videos/out.flv

From there, FlowPlayer has simple documentation for making Flash Video display within a player on your website.

See Also:

• Checkinstall: A safe way to try out cutting edge Linux software.
• ffmpegX – A GUI for ffmpeg on Mac OS X.
• PSPEnc – A GUI for ffmpeg on Windows.

( I haven’t tried the Windows and Mac software and can’t answer questions about it!)

I went into the experience cynical, having used many browsers in my experience as a professional website developer. What else could they possibly add that I would really want?

I found one feature in Flock that by itself makes it worth considering the browser.

Flock has built a better bookmark.

How Conventional Bookmarks Failed Me

In 1997 I became a bookmark fanatic and collected folder upon folder of them. Literally hundreds.

That worked OK until I started using more than one browser regularly, and the system broke down horrendously when I started using two computers regularly– one at work and one at home.

I could import bookmarks from one browser to another, but they quickly got out of sync.

Managing the bookmark mess

My solution– until now– was to move most of my bookmarks to a web-based system. Currently I’ve been fairly happy user of the free, non-commercial del.icio.us bookmarking service.

In this system all bookmarks are public, which is fine for most of my bookmarks. It builds on the synergy of many people sharing their bookmarks in the same place, enhancing my value of my own bookmarks. There are a lot of other reasons I like del.icio.us, but I digress.

del.icio.us made it very easy to get bookmarks into the system, but it was still a little harder that it seemed it should be to actually use the bookmarks.

Better bookmark storage

As a foundation of Flock’s bookmark system, my bookmarks are stored in my del.icio.us account. I can access the bookmarks directly in the browser or through the del.icio.us website, and flock automatically synchronizes between them. This means I can access my bookmarks easily from both my home and work computers, a real win.

This system blurs the line between public and private bookmarks. It takes some getting used to the concept that bookmarking something in my browser immediately makes it available to the rest of the world. I expect Flock will address this in a future release with private bookmarking option.

Better bookmark access

With the storage problem solved, there remains the difficulting of sifting through hundreds of bookmarks to find the Right One.

Flock does away with the conventional scheme of displaying folder within folder bookmarks. Instead, it offers three smarter ways to use my bookmarks. It actually tracks my most recently used bookmarks and my most frequently visited sites.

My personal favorite is the enhanced search bar (see screenshot). As I type a search term, Flock searches through my browsing history and searchs in real time for a match. I can select a result from the list or just press Enter as usual to search Google instead. Smart.

But before you download…

You can see in the screenshot that my “del.icio.us/markjugg” page appears twice in the history results. That second entry is not useful. Really, the first entry isn’t useful either, since this page represents just another copy of my bookmarks.

This is one of several rough edges in Flock that aren’t ironed out, earning it the “pre-alpha” status it currently has. If you try it out, expect a few glitches along the way.

For me, it’s been a refreshing and pleasant browser experience worth the few annoyances.

Then along came Google, which spoiled many users to the point where bookmarking was no longer time efficient, because they could just as easily look up the most accurate location for the site by typing in a few keywords, even if those words were only loosely associated with the place they were trying to get to. I know that I largely stopped using bookmarks for all but the most critical and most oft-visited destinations. But this also meant I lost touch with a lot of sites and good content that I might otherwise have visited more often. Google good, Google bad.

Then the whole “blogging” phenomenon came along which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, really wasn’t a new concept, just a refined way of doing it that worked particularly well. But this has shaped a lot of web content production into a particular paradigm related to the organization of postings, with a headline, content, category, archives, comments, trackbacks, and so on. Everyone from your next-door neighbor to major journalistic organizations are using blog-style content management systems to display and organize their content.

This kind of homogenization has led to the groundwork for web content syndication. What is it? Well, perhaps the most useful definition by way of analogy would be to think of major news wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters. When they compile a list of their news stories for newspapers to use, they just don’t write that list down in a text editor, print out a bunch of copies, and set them on the street outside their doorstep for editors to pick up. There is a standard format they use to produce a news wire containing all those stories, and then the newspapers have a standard set of tools they can use to read and manage the stories as they come in.

Until the advent of content syndication, it would have been unimaginable to think that I could have easy access to all of the content (“news stories”) – on all of the websites (“news sources”) that I cared about with some standard tool, instead of having to visit each site, scroll down the page, click around the navigation, and then move on to the next site. Not to mention keeping track of when I’d last read which story, visited which site, etc. But content syndication changes all that – it gives you one-click access to the latest additions to the sites you care about (or, at least the ones that have adopted news syndication in some form, which is a lot of them).

So how does this work? Well, at a basic level, when the maintainer of a site adds some new content to their site, they also (often through an automated process) update a news feed file with the basic information about that new content. (You may have seen the little orange block graphics that say “XML” or “RSS” or “syndicate” or “Feed”, or perhaps even just a link that says “syndicate this site” – those are all indicators that the site has a feed.) Users interested in the content on that site can point their news aggregator software to that news feed file, and then their software will let them know when new content is available.

For me, this means that I don’t have to visit (as of this writing) 46 websites when I want to see what’s new with them, I just wait for my news aggregation/reading software to tell me when there’s something to go see. In a lot of cases, you can even read the content from within that software, so you’re not even opening up the website itself. It saves me a lot of time, simplifies my web browsing experience, and allows me to keep up with a wide variety of content sources – everything from personal weblogs to the local newspaper to what my Congressional representatives did today to the latest MP3 file of my favorite public radio programs. You can even use feeds to track mailing lists that would otherwise be clogging your e-mail inbox. Wow.

So, how can you get started with content syndication? First you need to pick a news reading program. If you’re on a Mac, I recommend NetNewsWire (or NetNewsWire Lite, which is free), and now even the Safari web browser has a read built in. If you’re on Linux, try Straw for Gnome (I haven’t used it myself, let me know if there’s something better). If you’re on Windows, it looks like SharpReader and FeedReader (which integrates with Outlook) are recommended, with plenty of other options. If you don’t have a dedicated computer you use, you might consider using the web-based Bloglines, which will manage your feeds via a web-page that you can access from wherever you are.

Once you have your software set up, all you have to do is point it to the “feeds” for the sites you want to track. The instructions for doing this will vary, but usually you can just put in the address of the site, and the feed reader software will figure it out from there.

And you’re done. Feed reading bliss, content at your fingertips. Let me know how it works for you! (And don’t forget to subscribe to the Summersault Weblog: RSS feed link here.)

If you own or maintain a website, I also hope it’s clear how content syndication can help you too. Your users can stay informed of updates, and you can engage your target audience more fully by making it easier to bring them back to the site. Think of it as a customer newsletter sent out every time you make an update, with no effort on your part. It’s a service you can provide with very little effort, and pretty soon it may even be a service people will expect. So, tell your webmaster to get that feed file up and running – it could change the way people use your site!

I paid no mind to the announcement at the time, as I was happy enough with KOrganizer for this purpose. Recently one bug drove me over the edge to seek alternatives. I was being asked to repeatedly click on an error message which wasn’t helpful enough to allow me to solve the problem, which I couldn’t confirm was a problem anyway. Very frustrating.

In just a few days of use, Sunbird seems so much better– it’s hard to imagine going back anytime soon.

For those evaluating the alternatives, I offer this personal comparative review of the two applications, explaining which features are important to me, and how these two stack up.

Beyond the basic calendar features, I have two needs that might be considered challenging: I need to be able to see multiple calender events at once through one view, and I need support for some my calender data to be hosted remotely and refreshed automatically.

I also have a short “want list” of features that are nice to have but I can live without:

• the ability view and edit my work calendar from home
• reminders that popup on my desktop to notify me
• the ability to keep private events private when publishing