by
Brian Madden
By now everyone knows about RSS and how RSS feeds can "deliver" new content from blogs and news sites directly to your desktop. That said, how many people have moved beyond having "heard of" RSS and are actually using RSS?
Not many.
Personally, I read RSS feeds throughout the day. I use a news reader called "NewsFire" (Mac Only) that downloads the stories to my desktop. To me, these RSS items are just as critical as email, and this is how I keep tabs with what's going on in our industry. Then again, that's my job. A lot of other people don't have the time to mess with this stuff.
So anyway, I wanted to create a site where everyone could get an "at a glance" view of what's happening in the application delivery community. And that site is our BrianMadden.com Community News Aggretor. (www.brianmadden.com/news)
This site is dirt-simple. It's just a website that pulls content from all of the RSS feeds in our industry. It lists everything in reverse-chronological order on a single page. We took cues from Google for styling. There are no ads. No popups. No voting or ranking. And the links go directly back to the source articles. (Oh, and it's also really, really fast.)
The site automatically updates itself every hour. People who have seen this site have said, "Hey! This nothing more than an RSS feed aggretor!" Our answer? "Excatly!"
The other cool aspect of this site is that we added a couple of custom Google search engines. There's a link to the same new community search that's on BrianMadden.com that we announced a few weeks ago. However, we also added a "tech support" community search engine. This tech support search engine searches all of the support sites in our industy (but only the support sections of each site). For instance, it includes the BrianMadden.com forums, the Citrix forums and KB, the Microsoft KB, the THIN list archive, the DABCC forums, etc.
So check out the new site and let us know what you think. This certainly isn't going to replace anything that we're doing on BrianMadden.com--it's just a one-stop page for you to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in our industry.
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