Day: October 13, 2005

If you’re on here and understand that you are reading a blog, you are likely familiar with RSS and Atom technologies. RSS and Atom files (“feeds”) are each ways of syndicating content from a website. For example, this blog’s RSS feed contains headlines and short summaries of long posts, or the full content of short posts. The comments feed does the same thing for comments.

Here comes the neat part. These feeds can be “aggregated” – pulled together by software products – to notify you whenever a favorite blog has a new post, or when news breaks, or when a new comic strip is written. One great and free program for doing just that is FeedReader. It’s very simple to use; I use it to keep up with news, comics, political commentary, my favorite sports teams, friends, and more.

Most of the people reading this page probably have an AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) screen name. A lot of you probably have AOL, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Jabber screen names. Keeping all those IM (Instant Messaging) clients logged in and up to date can be a real pain. Enter Gaim, today’s FOSS OTD. Gaim lets you use all of the above networks, plus IRC, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise, and Zephyr, all in a single client. All in all, it’s a great little program, and it’s the only IM client I use, these days. Check it out.