Chris Pirillo » rss-feed

What Role Do Blogs Play in Your Life?

Chris — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:07:21 +0000

What Role Do Blogs Play in Your Life? is a post from Chris Pirillo

Even if you’re not a blogger yourself, chances are you read a few of them. It seems like everyone is blogging these days, including my mom on occasion (so ok, maybe not recently). Heck, even when you aren’t intending to read a blog, you may end up doing so after following a link from a search engine when you’re looking for something specific. Let’s face it – blogs are everywhere.

Obviously, blogging is a central part of my life. The work I do here plays a large part in not only my work life, but my personal one, as well. I like to think I’ve found a good balance between the two, and try to keep them as “equal” as possible here on my site. My friend Robert Scoble is the same way. If you go through his blog, you’ll see that he also has managed to balance life/work/family, and wrap it all nicely into his blog.

To me, that’s the way a blog should be. I’ve seen people who have several different blogs. They may post work-related things to one, personal to another, and social things to yet another. Where’s the sense in that? Why can you not post everything in one central place? Both Robert and I – along with many, MANY others, have managed to do so. If you have more than one blog, why do you? I would like to hear from some of you “multi-bloggers”, and hear your reasons as to why you do things the way you do. Understand that I’m not putting down the way you do things. I honestly feel that maybe I am missing something, and not seeing the whole picture.

In any case, blogs are important. They can be a source of information. They can keep you current on what’s hot – and what’s not. They can give you different viewpoints on matters that you may not have otherwise thought of. And, they can make you laugh. So, I ask you…

How do reading blogs impact your life? For the blogs you go back to time and again, what attracts you? Is it the content itself, or the author’s writing style? Are you gaining information, educating yourself, or just having a good laugh? What types of blogs do you subscribe to – and how many of them?

Our Lockergnome community is devoted entirely to bloggers, with topics ranging from IT to Dogs – and everything you can think of in between. Over on Geeks, we have a large number of bloggers, as well. How many of these people are you taking the time to follow? If you aren’t checking them out, you’re missing out.

I have a team of people working hard every day to bring you updates on all of your favorite programs and apps, and let you know about the best new ones available. Keep your eyes on what’s new every day, so that you don’t miss out on anything!

How to Get RSS Feeds via Email

Chris — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:26:40 +0000

How to Get RSS Feeds via Email is a post from Chris Pirillo

Add to iTunes | Add to YouTube | Add to Google | RSS Feed

Wicket is one who believes RSS is dead. He thinks that Twitter has replaced RSS as a means of receiving information. Just about every site out there has an RSS feed, which can be delivered to you via your Email if you choose. Did you know that every Twitter user has their own RSS feed? At one point, I swore that Email was dead, and was being replaced by RSS feeds. So it’s funny that Wicket claims RSS is now dead!

Let’s get back to the whole receiving RSS feeds via your Email. There’s a service out there that will easily allow you to add and manage your feeds, and have them delivered right to your inbox. Feed My Inbox is a free service that allows blogs, feeds and news to magically show up in your inbox.

Find the site you would like to track, such as a blog, a news site, twitter feed, or even craigslist search results. Most browsers will display whether there is a feed on the page or not. Find the RSS icon on the right side of your browser. Once you find a feed you would like to subscribe to, simply type in the URL for that site on Feed My Inbox. The service will locate feeds available on that site, and allow you to choose what you want to subscribe to.

After you verify your email address, you’re set. You’ll receive an email each time the feed is updated – but not more than once in a 24-hour period. This cuts down on clutter in your inbox. So, if there’s one update or twenty, you’ll receive only one email with everything inside.

You can also easily unsubscribe to any or all of your feeds whenever you choose. At the bottom of each new update/email, there will be an unsubscribe link. Click it once, and you’ll never receive updates from that particular site again.

Feed My Inbox is a great way to stay connected, and stay on top of the news, without having to go searching for it.

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Social Views of Email on the Desktop

Chris — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:53:46 +0000

Social Views of Email on the Desktop is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Incoming information via RSS feeds can be completely overwhelming. More people every day are using social networks and other forms of communication. Microsoft developers are working hard to make this much easier on all of us.

The team has come up with a tool that will automatically analyze your communication and organize it into groups. Depending on when and who you’re talking to, a different stream of information can be presented.

The goal of automatic group discovery is not only to detect the initial grouping, but also to discover slow changes to groups over time. This will keep you from having to manage everything manually.

There are also different ways to look at an incoming stream of information. You can choose from a condensed view for small screens, or a gorgeous immersive experience. You can zoom into additional pages to get to your older messages, or do a search by a timeline-based presentation.

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How to Map the Daily News

Chris — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:42:47 +0000

How to Map the Daily News is a post from Chris Pirillo

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This screen saver is called MappedUp. If you’re using either Windows or OS X, you can use it, just like I do. It will not only alert you to news as it’s happening – it will also show you where it’s happening!

MappedUp continuously tracks several RSS news feeds. These are shown on the World map as either red or yellow dots. A red dot means that the feed was very recently updated. A yellow dot means it hasnt’ been updated for awhile. By hovering your mouse over a dot, you can read the title of an article. By clicking the title, you can go to the website to read the full story.

MappedUp is free to use, and you don’t have to sign up. However, if you sign up (still free), you can customize which feeds you want to have displayed on your map… and even choose specific tags you want the feeds to look for.

This isn’t just another boring news source. It’s interactive, cool and fun! It’s a great way to get all of the latest news delivered to your desktop without boring you to tears. You are in control of what news you get, and when (or if!) you choose to read it.

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How To Search Amazon, YouTube, and Twitter in Windows 7

Chris — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:54:35 +0000

How To Search Amazon, YouTube, and Twitter in Windows 7 is a post from Chris Pirillo

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RSS is powerful, for sure. I’ve been a fan of it since before it was supported natively within the web browser. I built a service called TagJag, where you can go to look for things you want to buy. It will generate RSS search feeds that you can subscribe to. Why would you want to do that? Let me explain, my dear Watson.

When you open the TagJag site, you will see a search box. Enter your search term in there. It can be as broad or as specific as you want. It depends on you, and if you know exactly what you’re looking for. Once you click the “Search” button, you’ll get a list of results from places like eBay and Amazon. You’ll even get a listing of related items.

Where the power of TagJag lies is within the little RSS feed icon. If you click it, it will take you to the full-on RSS feed for that search. If you subscribe to that feed with your reader, you’ll be notified every time something new is added to that particular search result feed.

The reason I’m showing you all of this is that I’m going to teach you how to integrate Amazon searches, eBay searches, YouTube searches and more all from within Windows 7. Let’s say you want to search for results in my blog. Now that I’ve installed a Search Connector (simple text file), I have an option in my search tree within my Windows 7 that says “Chris Pirillo”. I enter a word within the search bar, and bam… it searches my blog. RSS search is the gateway! I’m able to search for things on my blog without even having to go to my blog!

Remember that Amazon search feed I showed you earlier? After integrating it within a Search Connector file, I will just double-click to install it. Presto… it was added to my Windows search tree. Yeah, I can go to Amazon and search for things, or to my blog or YouTube. But why would I? This is so much easier, and faster.

Download the Search Connectors onto your install of Windows 7, and see how much simpler your life will be!

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How to Turn Your PSP into a Wireless Digital Photo Frame

coupons — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 10:51:51 +0000

How to Turn Your PSP into a Wireless Digital Photo Frame is a post from Chris Pirillo

This is Firebucket’s submission for the HP Magic Giveaway. Feel free to leave comments for this article as you see fit – your feedback is certainly welcomed! If you’d like to submit your own how-to, what-is, or top-five list, you can send it to me. Views and opinions of this writer are not necessarily my own:

If you have an old PSP lying around, don’t know what to do with it and you have an absence of photo frames, this might just be able to solve your problem.

If you have a Flickr account and a few pictures (or even hundreds), you can set-up so your PSP grabs those pictures from your account using an RSS feed and then play them in a slideshow.

So, here’s what you need:

A Sony PlayStation Portable with the latest firmware (recommended but NOT vital)
A Flickr account (www.flickr.com) with at least a few pictures to get you started.
Wi-Fi Connection in your home/office or wherever you are.
FeedBurner Account (www.feedburner.com)

Let’s get started, shall we?

Open your Flickr account, and tag some pictures with a unique name (like ‘pspfeed’) and take the RSS feed of that tag (You > Your Tags > Select the Tag > and then click Latest at the bottom of the page, next to geoFeed and KML).
Obviously, if you look in your address bar, you’ve got one HUGE address. Now, you could obviously use TinyURL, but FeedBurner is much better when it comes to a) shortening RSS feeds and b) managing them, so we’ll use that method. So, head over to FeedBurner and sign up; don’t worry – it’s free.
When you get to the ‘My Feeds’ page, copy and paste that RSS feed URL we took from Flickr earlier, and paste it into the ‘Burn a feed right now’ option, and click Next. Give your Feed a Name and a shortened URL (Example: Feed Title: My PSP Flickr Feed, URL: feeds.feedburner.com/mypspfeed). Click Activate Feed, and remember the RSS Feed URL you just ‘burned’ using FeedBurner.
Time to get the PSP configured. Make sure you have Wi-Fi all setup and enabled on your PSP (I’m not going to explain this because it varies upon your network, a simple Google search may be able to help you, though). Navigate to the web browser, and open up the address bar. Enter in the RSS Feed URL we made earlier, using FeedBurner, and open it. It will then prompt you to add this to the PSP’s own collection of RSS feeds, so you don’t have to type in the address every time you want to open the slideshow of photos. Exit the web browser and navigate to RSS Channel, and select the feed you just added.

Voila! The pictures that you tagged SHOULD be there, playing in a slideshow. I believe this also works with videos, and if you use a service that allows you to do this (take an RSS feed and place it into your PSP), you should really give it a shot. Hey! Why not even cover up the rest of the PSP (with something, but I have no idea what), and leave the screen showing, so people aren’t put off by the rest of the PSP.

You can avoid the entire wireless setup, and just throw some photos onto a memory card and load that up, like a traditional digital photo frame.

How Many Words Per Minute can You Read?

Chris — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:02:41 +0000

How Many Words Per Minute can You Read? is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Do you consider yourself a speed reader? Are you looking for ways to improve your reading speed? If so, there’s a website that can help you do just that. Spreed News allows you to use the Spreed interface to read your news faster than ever before.

Spreed : News, is a revolution in reading in itself. For the past two years the Spreed team has been researching an area of Cognitive Psychology called Eye Science. From this research they have develop a number of algorithms that take into account grammar, syntax and personal reading patterns. These algorithms make up the patented Spreed Reader which has been used in Spreed : News to help people read their daily news at speeds they never thought possible and with an overall increase in comprehension.

You can practice speed reading when you’re away from the desktop using this. I’ve never seen anything like this, at least not in a Web experience. In college, I took a speed reading elective. I learned a bit about how to improve my comprehension. It’s far easier for me to grasp when I was reading things I wanted to read, and am interested in. By letting you subscribe to your own RSS feeds, Spreed is doing just that. You’re improving your skills by reading what it is YOU want to read.

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OPML to RSS

Chris — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 20:09:43 +0000

OPML to RSS is a post from Chris Pirillo

We’ve got a single OPML file containing the links and feeds of every 2006 Gnomedexer, thanks to the code sleuthing of Kosso. This is good for importing “everybody” en masse into your news aggregator. However, it’s not always as efficient as a single feed. So, Shayne whipped out a 400-line script to convert OPML to RSS – and I think we’re going to call it “KissMyOPML” for fun. The PHP script will be open source, available for everybody soon, and is also a sign of things to come in the near future with Gada.be (which will mash feeds faster than the average install). Remember, Gada.be outputs OPML for every search query; think about it. You can subscribe to the Gnomedexer feed immediately – and if your name isn’t listed in the conference attendee OPML, please let us know ASAP so we can get the proper information in there.

How to Handle Remote Tech Support

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:30:00 GMT

Using GoToAssist is the easiest way to view and control another person's computer online. Use it to provide instant technical support to family, friends and customers. Start a session with just one click, and instantly connect with the other party.

Network Tools for Windows

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:30:00 GMT

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Get Your Own Web Site

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:30:00 GMT

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VMware and Parallels for Virtual Machines

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:30:00 GMT

It doesn't matter if you're running on Windows or Mac OS X - every power user needs either Parallels or VMware (or both). There's never been an easier way to test software without destroying your primary operating system's stability. Think of how many times you wish you could press a 'reverse' button on your computer. Plus, there's no easier way to try new Linux distributions - see what all the fuss is about. Run Windows in OS X, run Linux in Windows, but the best way to do either is with VMware and/or Parallels.

Coupons for Online Shopping

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:56:13 GMT

This feed is fueled by Lockergnome Online Shopping and Coupon Codes

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