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For
experienced RSS Users.
You
can also now subscribe to our mag via the above
free RSS Feed service.
Or if you already have RSS reader software, just
grab this URL.

For
new RSS Users.
There's a rather interesting
new technology recently arrived on the Internet,
a little beastie called RSS, which promises to
make our lives a little easier.
Doh, you say?
Well RSS - which stands for really simple syndication
- is the latest internet technology now being
touted as the new best way to get content delivered
to you (a) as it happens and (b) without all that
awful spam cluttering up our e-mail in-boxes.
After all, there's only so many offers to increase
the size of your vital organs, get rich quick
by sending money to a Nigeria's ex-Treasury Minister,
and smoke herbal viagra a fellow can take in a
day.
Anyway ... just like the way you get e-mail,
you'll either need some software on your PC, or
an online service in the same vein as Hotmail,
to read RSS-sent content.
You can then subscribe to your choice of thousands
of news feeds and have them aggregated on a single
page - so no more checking site after site to
stay current on the subjects, hobbies and news
that interest you. Just open up your RSS reading
software and voila, it's all there to read in
one place.
I'm currently using the free web-based Bloglines.com
service to do this (think Hotmail for RSS). I
was attracted by the fact it's run as a free online
service. Which means no extra software consuming
my already fragile supply of hard disk space,
plus I can catch up on my reading in the local
internet cafe when I'm travelling.
In fact, you can subscribe to the SFcrowsnest's
own daily news updates, directly via Bloglines,
by clicking this link, and signing up for one
of their free accounts: http://www.bloglines.com/
Once you've got your Bloglines account set up,
here's some extra SF&F content to subscribe
to:
About.com's Hailing Frequencies Newsletter
http://z.about.com/6/g/scifi/b/index.rdf
Xenite.org SFF News
http://www.xenite.org/channels/xenite-org.rss
Sci-Fi Channel's Sci-Fi Wire Daily News
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/rss/index.xml
Vanguard Report Daily Sci-Fi News
http://www.vanguardreport.com/phpnuke/backend.php
Bloglines seems remarkably ad-free at the moment,
although I suspect that might change as their
popularity grows. If you would prefer to install
the RSS software on your own PC, Mac or whatever,
then there's a large list of applications over
here.
I have heard good things about an RSS-Microsoft
Outlook plugin called NewsGator over at www.newsgator.com
as well as stand-alone RSS software from www.headlineviewer.com
and http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/
- but have no hands-on experience of using them
myself.
Of course, if RSS is old hat to you and
I am preaching to the converted, the Nest's
new daily content feed can be subscribed
to directly using the URL http://www.sfcrowsnest.co.uk/rss.xml
and your existing RSS software
Once you're up and running with RSS, you can
look up an even wider range of the RSS content
available online, via the trusty 'Yahoo' of RSS,
www.syndic8.com
- everything from fly fishing to filk singing
is listed on their directory pages. You truly
are spoiled for choice, and my RSS channels now
include PHP programming, FileMaker Pro database
tips, share price feeds for my day trading hobby,
books reviews from Amazon for their fiction charts,
and more SFF goodies than you can shake a stick
at.
One warning though. Just like e-mail, once you've
had a taste of RSS, you'll wonder how you ever
managed to live without it. Enjoy, you science
fiction and fantasy R(a)SS(cals).

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