How to Use RSS Feeds

By | October 1, 2008
2 Comments

If there’s one thing I get more questions about than anything else, it’s “how do I do the whole RSS thing?” So here’s a cut out and keep guide to how do get up to speed on RSS.

First off, a brief introduction (and why you should care.) Feeds are the mainstay of the Web world. They deliver information to you without the clutter of email and can be read from any computer. They used to be just for reading blogs, but nowadays you can access your calendar, to do lists, and more or less anything you want via an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. RSS is useful; it’s just a shame it’s a bit too geeky to be really straightforward.

This is how I do it. Yes, there are quicker and easier ways to set up feeds, and yes, this all sounds a bit unexciting and fiddly. But this approach, in my view, is the best because once it’s set up, you don’t have to do very much. And if you already have a Gmail email account, this makes even more sense.

1. Install Firefox browser if you don’t have it already. Download it from here. (www.getfirefox.com). (Firefox works better at doing this than other browsers; I suggest you use Firefox as your main browser; it also means this guide will work equally well for Mac users.) 

2. In the View menu in Firefox, go to the Toolbars sub-menu and click on the Bookmarks Toolbar if it is not already ticked. This will add a toolbar below the top row of buttons in your browser.

3. Now, using Firefox, go to Google Reader’s homepage (www.google.com/reader/) Open a Google account if you don’t have one by clicking on the link Create an account now. Follow all the steps necessary to have a Google account (you can use this for email too) and to set up your Google Reader.

4. In Google Reader, click on Settings in the top right hand corner, and then Goodies. Scroll down to the section “Subscribe as you surf.” Drag the Subscribe… button in that section to your Bookmarks toolbar (the on you just set up). Do this by moving the cursor over the orange button until the pointer turns into a pointing hand. Click on the link and, without releasing your finger from the mouse button, drag the link to the toolbar at the top of your page. Release the mouse button, and you’ll see a white sheet icon with “Subscribe” next to it. (If it doesn’t work the first time, try again.)

5. You now need to add some feeds to your Reader. Visit a web page with an RSS feed on it. (If you’re stuck for choice, visit my own humble abode at www.loosewireblog.com.) In the address field at the top of the browser, where the web site address is located, you’ll see an orange RSS icon in the right hand corner. This icon, the accepted button for RSS stuff, indicates an RSS feed is available. Click on the “Subscribe” button you just installed in your Firefox toolbar.

6. Your browser will take you to your Google Reader page, and will have loaded the RSS feed from the page you just visited. You’ll see 10 or so items from that feed listed in the Reader.Click on the blue/grey “Subscribe” button in the top right hand corner of the Google Reader.

7. A yellow bar will appear in the top half of the screen. Click on the “Add to folder” pull down menu in that bar and then, at the bottom of that list, click on “New folder”. Add a name for the folder you want to keep this RSS feed in (“news” or “personal” or whatever.) Click OK. The folder will now appear in the left hand pane with the feed you’ve just subscribed to.

8. To read the feed either click on the name of the feed, in blue, on the left hand pane, or the folder icon and title of the folder it belongs to. The latter will include all feeds in that folder, gathered together. The former will just be the feed you’ve subscribed to.

9. To view just the headlines of each feed, click on “List View” in the top hand corner of the Google Reader; to read more extended chunks (and sometimes the whole post) click on “Expanded View” next to it. To read the post on its original web site (rather than in Google Reader) click on the headline to expand the view of the post, and then the larger font headline below. The link will open in a new browser window.)

10. Now you can add feeds to your collection whenever you see the orange icon appear in the address box of a page you visit.

That’s it. Let me know how you got on, whether you have more questions, tips or requests for more guides. Good luck.

Updater Fever

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

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I sometimes wonder what software companies—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, they’re all the same—want from their customers.

I spend enough time with novice users to know how confusing using computer software can be. Especially online: It’s a scary world out there (they’re right to be scared) but these companies, which should know better, make it more so. By trying to hoodwink into using their products they are undermining users’ confidence in using computers in the first place. If they keep on doing this, expect more people to use computers less—and certainly to install less software, or experiment in any way online or off.

Take what just happened. I use Windows Live Writer to blog: it’s an excellent program, by far the best things Microsoft has done in years, and today it prompted me that an update was available. I duly clicked on the link to download the Writer beta installer:

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Only, of course, it wasn’t the installer but The Installer From Hell:

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Prechecked are six programs, none of which I have on my computer right now. There’s no single button to uncheck those boxes, and most novice users may not even know they can (note the confusing text above it: “Click each program name for details” and “Choose the programs you want to install”—nothing to explain to novices that these choices have already been made for you, and how to unchoose them.)

It’s not as if Microsoft is trying to sell us smack. This is free software. But it’s very damaging in ways only someone who spends time with real people can understand. Even when the software is installed for example, you get this last little twist of the Knife of Befuddlement:

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This might not seem like much, but if you’re an ordinary user, finding your home page all different and your search engine altered to something else can be as disorienting as coming home to find someone’s moved your furniture and the cooker is now in the bathroom. Well, not quite that much, but you get the idea.

Of course Microsoft’s not alone in this. Even Google’s been playing the game, and Yahoo! tries to bundle the toolbar in with pretty much every piece of software that’s ever been downloaded–which also alters the homepage, and default search engine, and probably moves the fridge around as well.

The problem is that the more these companies try to fool us, the easier it is for real scammers to scam us—because what they both do starts to look very similar.

Take this scam that I came across this morning. A splog (spam blog—a fake blog) had used some of my material so when I tried to access the page to find out why, I instead got this believable looking popup

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This without me doing anything other than clicking on a link to a blog. A graphic in the background appeared to be checking the computer for viruses, and of course this window is nigh on impossible to get rid of. Try clicking on the red cross and you get this:

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Try to get rid of that and you get this:

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And then this:

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It’s obviously a scam (it’s adware), but it’s darned hard to get rid of. And to the ordinary user (by which I mean someone who has a real life, and therefore doesn’t see this kind of thing as intrinsically interesting) there’s no real difference between the trickery perpetrated by these grammatically challenged scammers, and the likes of Microsoft et al, who try to inveigle their software and homepage/search engine preferences into your computer.

Either way, the ordinary user is eventually going to tire of the whole thing and say “enough!” and go out fishing or, if it’s that time of year, wassailing.

Let’s try to avoid that.

(And yes, the latest version Live Writer is good, though don’t use the spellchecker. Just a shame that it’s made by Microsoft.)

The Lucrative Loneliness of the Chinese

By | October 1, 2008
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By Jeremy Wagstaff

At what point do social networks on the Internet start to supplant ones in real life?

Take China, for example. It’s a relatively big example, so it’s worth taking.

According to a recent article in Web in Travel, an online travel publication, China now has two generations of one-child families, and, in the words of Harry Hui, chief marketing officer of PepsiCo International, “one of the loneliest generations in the world.”

Of course, he’s saying this like it’s a good thing, because marketers love lonely people (they can sell them chocolate and other kinds of comfort food, for example.) But more interesting for me were the implications for technology as a kind of security blanket.

Here’s how it looks to Hui. “Within those born in the post-80s, there are 470 million and their world is very different. The Gang of Four is a thing of the past. The Cultural Revolution is an art movement. They are brought up by their grandparents because their parents were working. They live in one household, shaped by three generations.”

Hui paints a picture of young people isolated by a missing generation and an absence of siblings—and presumably a shortage of cousins. Unsurprisingly, then, they’re turning to social networks, where they gather friends they are likely to know only online: “Friendster has more virtual friends in China than anywhere else,” said Hui.

If this is true—I’m not quite clear how Hui came by this information—it would seem to paint a picture of a disoriented youth pressured to get on but without the usual support network of real-life friends to help them. He quotes a China Mobile survey which seems to confirm this over-dependence on technology: “The mobile phone is more important than boyfriends or girlfriends for 90% of the younger generation,” he says.

It’s not as if China is alone in embracing technology. Indonesians have become big users of cellphones—and mobile browsers, proving they’re not just using them to send text messages, but have leapfrogged the Western model by adopting the cellphone as their primary computer—and the Philippines has also become a massive user of Friendster.

But I suspect each example tells a slightly different story. Technology is moulded to the needs of people. Social networks fit the cultural requirements of a society. And societies are different. If people are stuck in traffic all day, then mobiles become more important, a la Indonesia. (You also see a lot of usage of SMS, because people need to communicate short bursts of information to one another when they have little control over the speed of their movements, so to speak.)

In China, I guess, what we’re seeing is a combination of this: a generation that is comfortable with the mobile phone but lacking the physical social network that their parents had. In this case, maybe social networking is fulfilling a slightly different need: online friendships aren’t just a continuation of real-world ties, but relationships that are created and defined online. That’s the relationship.

This will all grow and expand massively as our cellphones become more powerful, do more for us. Juniper Research last month predicted that the number of active users of mobile social networking sites is expected to rise from 54 million this year to nearly 730 million in 2013.

Most of that is going to be in north and Southeast Asia, but don’t forget India: that, Juniper says, will become the largest region for mobile dating services by 2010. I rest my case that every society bends technology to its will.

Marketing people are clearly waking up to all this. But so should we.

You can’t help wondering what happens next in a place like China. If a nation of single children marry and have one child themselves, who in turn grows up and has one child with another single-offspring person, at what point does technology move beyond just being a crutch to being the cultural gate itself, through which all friendships, romances and connections evolve?

In short, what happens when Facebook becomes not just a reflection of one’s world, but the world itself?

Yes, we mould technology to suit us, but we need to be alert to the possibility of the reverse: that it defines us.

Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

 

Google Suggest: Your Company + Scam

By | November 22, 2011
1 Comment

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I find that the auto suggestions feature from Google Suggest in the Firefox search box very useful. But perhaps not in the way it was intended.

Google Suggest works via algorithms that “use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers.” In other words,  type one word and Google will tell you the next word most likely to be typed after it. Type “dimitar” and the most likely second word will be “berbatov” (this may not been a lot to non-soccer fans, but trust me, the two words go together like rock and roll for the rest of us):

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This can be useful, or at least revealing.

For example, I received one of those awful pieces of spam from Tagged.com that give the whole social networking thing a bad name:

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Click on the “Click here to block all emails from Tagged Inc., 110 Pacific Mall Box #117, San Francisco, CA. 94111” and you’re taken to a page where you’re asked to sign in or sign up. A sure sign of a scam if ever there was one; what happened to opting out a la CANSPAM?

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So I figured I should Google these clowns and see what’s being said about them. Type their name into the Firefox search box, and then hit the space bar, and this was what Google offered me as the most popular search terms:

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Having your product name coupled with “spam” and “scam” in its top three searches can’t be good.

Needless to say, tagged.com is a scam, at least in the way it tries to hoodwink users into signing up and signing up their friends. Here’s how the excellent and resourceful Amit Agarwal recommends you get rid of it from your inbox. It’s a shame that so many apparently good names are involved in something so blatantly anti-social and spammy. At what point do these people feel they’ve lost the game and allow corners to be cut? One of the founders even spoke at last year’s Authentication and Online Trust Summit for crying out loud.

The bigger issue is how to stop these sites from damaging social networking further. But that’s for another day. For now, using Google Suggest is a good quick way to know whether you’re on a hiding to nothing if you even click on a link in one of these emails. Take another scam networking site I’ve written about recently, Yaari. Its Google Suggest juice comes out looking similarly dodgy:

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Compare that with something a bit more bona fide, like LinkedIn:

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While this is a useful tool for us, I’m guessing that the companies involved are going to be hiring some drones to try to massage these results so they don’t look quite so  bad.

An Answer to Our Scanning Prayers?

By | November 22, 2011
2 Comments

 NeatDesk

I’m always amazed at how weak the market for scanners is. The devices aren’t always that good, and the software that accompanies them is generally speaking pretty awful. Those that were once good, like PaperMaster, are now dead.

So it’s good to hear that NeatReceipts, once interested mainly in, well, scanning receipts, is now called The Neat Company, and is about to launch NeatDesk – “the all-new desktop scanner and digital filing system.” It’s got what looks like a pretty cool Automatic Document Feeder scanner that will take receipts, business cards and documents—in the same scan.

I used NeatReceipts and thought it was a good effort—it did a good job of trying to parse receipts, although the user interface was overly complex and the software not particularly stable. Neat Co says the software has been completely overhauled.

The device is going to sell for $400+ once it’s launched. More anon.

The Neat Company – Preorder Sale

Update: Evernote have added PDF preview for Windows. Is there room anymore for Paperport and its ilk? This is a great addition to Evernote and something I think really pushes it into the ‘capture all your cr*p’ category. Good on them.