RSS Minnow

Unlike the skipper and his slow shipmate, Gilligan –
RSS has nothing to do with the
ocean.
However, if you don’t know what it means, you could be just as lost.
You’ll need a News Aggregator, which is a program that collects RSS files from across
the internet and without much work turns them into viewable bits of text with links
to full articles.

This is quite nifty, especially if you think about how many sites you might look through in
a day.
Lets say that you check out www.randypeterman.com every day and you think to yourself,
“Golly, Randy doesn’t put up news stuff that often, I wish there was a way I could
be notified when he does put some new news up.”
Well, with RSS and an aggregator (I recommend
FeedDemon)
you could just open up the aggregator and you’d see if I did or not.
You’re smart, so you say, “I can do that now with a browser, why not just do that?”
Well, I’ll tell you what, if you check enough sites in one day this could really save
you time, assuming that they have RSS feeds.

The bottom line is that if you’re a busy individual, you can save a lot of time by simply
adding an RSS aggregator to your computer-lifestyle.
I check FeedDemon every morning with my email, so I know if some of the websites I read
regularly have been updated.
I can also get the news and other fun information, all with this handy-dandy little file
format.
Yes, file format, because RSS is
just a file.

CSS? What Does that Mean?

It means Cascading Style Sheets.
Its a nice way to make the pages look good without loading them down with extra
HTML so that the page
gets super heavy, making dialup connections unbearable, and older browsers
cough and hack on nested tables..

I use stylesheets to make the page have multiple styles.
Find the “Pick a style” links and test it out.

What Are Access Keys?

Do you use Microsoft Access?
Good for you.
Accesskey’s don’t have anything to do with MS Office Access.
But they do have to do with handicap accessibility, or just plain quick shortcut keys.

If you are using Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher on windows you can use accesskeys by
pressing Alt + whatever the accesskey is.
For example, on this site, the news link accesskey is the key number 1 (one).
So, using your super sleuth mind, you probably already put Alt and 1 together and came up
with an algebra equation.
Once you’re done with your algebra, try pressing and holding the Alt key and then
pressing the ‘1’ (one) key.
Nothing happened did it? In Internet Explorer you have to then press the enter key because
the accesskey only moves the cursor’s focus to the link associated with the accesskey.
However, if you want to use Mozilla you’ll find the accesskeys trigger the links as well.

If you’re on the Macintosh I’m told you should use the Ctrl (Control) key.
I don’t have one, so I’ll just take the word of the professionals who passed on that tidbit
of information.