“Cookies” are generally harmless and oftentimes helpful bits of information stored by your Web browser when you visit many Web sites for the first time. Once a Web site sets a cookie in your Web browser, unique information stored in the cookie is used by the site identify you on subsequent visits. Because the site is able to set you apart from all of its other visitors, it is able to effectively customize itself according to your past preferences and recall information that you may have entered on previous visits; the reason that the Google search engine “remembers” how many results that you prefer per page or your favorite Web-based store is able to display the contents of your shopping cart from a week ago, for example, is due to the fact that cookies from these sites have been implanted in your Web browser.
It should be re-asserted that cookies are essentially harmless; they are not viruses or malware and cannot directly alter information on your computer. Many Web sites, in fact, will not function properly unless your Web browser is configured to accept cookies. Cookies are not, however, viewed positively by everyone. The use of “tracking” cookies by advertisers to monitor personal browsing habits is considered by some to be a violation of their privacy. In addition, cookies can in rare instances cause Web-based applications such as the Fordham University Portal to malfunction until they are removed.
Because of these concerns, it is advisable to be aware of how to control the way in which your particular Web browser handles cookies and delete cookies from your browser if necessary. This week’s screen cast will demonstrate how to configure cookie handling and removal in the Mozilla FireFox Web browser. Next week, I’ll do the same for Internet Explorer and Safari.
This feature that enables this is a portal “channel” called “My RSS”. Along with many other useful channels, this feature may be added to your personal Fordham University portal page as you customize it to suit your needs.
Although not as powerful as using a full-featured RSS reader such as those demonstrated in my previous posts on the topic (e.g. see posts demonstrating Google Reader, NetNewsWire, FeedDemon), using the “My RSS” channel can allow you to quickly check up on one of your most valuable RSS-enabled Web sites while conducting your daily business on the Fordham portal.
Documentation regarding the use of the Fordham portal as well as several screencast tutorials can be found on your portal home page.
-Jim
(behnke@fordham.edu)
Photo Credit RSS and MyFilesby technovore via Flickr
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
NetNewsWire is a free RSS aggregator for Mac OSX created by Newsgator, the same company that produces the free “Feed Demon” RSS reader for Windows. In addition to NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, Newsgator offers “Newsgator Online“, a free Web-based RSS reader service that can synchronize with NetNewsWire or FeedDemon. This allows users of either desktop application to follow their RSS feeds when away from their computers and effectively create a backup of their RSS subscriptions.
For my third screencast on the topic of RSS feeds, I’ve decided to demonstrate how to use NetNewsWire’ to subscribe to RSS feeds, organize their subscriptions, and, in conjunction with Newsgator Online, create custom RSS feeds based on existing RSS-enabled content from around the Web. Custom RSS feeds are made using NetNewWire’s “Clipping” feature (also available on FeedDemon). For professors who maintain their own Web sites or Blackboard pages, this capability could provide a way to quickly share content from around the Web with students and colleagues who use RSS readers applications.
As detailed in my previous post on the subject, RSS reader applications can save a great deal of time and enhance productivity by providing a simple way to monitor novel content from a great many Web-based resources. In addition to allowing users to easily subscribe to and view current content using RSS feeds, RSS reader applications, such as the FeedDemondesktop application for Windows, often provide advanced capabilities for sorting and searching RSS-enabled information.
Produced the a company called NewsGator, FeedDemon is a free and provides features that users who have subscribed to a lot of RSS feeds in different subject areas will appreciate. It allows users to organize RSS feeds into folders, “flag” important posts for future viewing, perform keyword searches on feeds, and create saved searches to automatically monitor RSS-feeds from many different Web sites for particular keywords.
I’ve demonstrated some of these features in this week’s screencast.
Like e-mail applications, most RSS-readers have the same general features and stand out in certain areas. FeedDemon seems to have some excellent reporting capabilities. Google Reader provides integration with the other Google services for sharing feeds and searching for RSS-enabled Web sites. I will use NetNewsWire (Mac) for my demonstration next week.
What is your favorite RSS reader application? What do you think of “FeedDemon”?
We live in a world where time is precious and the amount of new information that appears every day on any given topic can be overpowering. RSS feeds and RSS reader applications can be very powerful tools for students and professionals who want to tame “information overload” while keeping up with the latest information in their areas of Interest and expertise.
What is RSS and why is it useful?
RSS, short for “Really Simple Syndication”, is a way for Web sites to publish content so that users of RSS reader applications, or “rss aggregators” can easily view links to the site’s latest content. Web sites with RSS-enabled content make their latest pages available to users of RSS reader applications by using links to RSS documents (also referred to as “feeds”, “web feeds”, or “channels”).
Links to RSS “feeds” on RSS-enabled Web sites are typically represented by images labeled as “RSS” or “XML” (short for “eXtensible Markup Language”, the type of code that makes up RSS documents).
In fact, you’ve probably seen them on just about every website you visit, but didn’t know what it was or what it was for!! For some slides on how to recognize feeds and find them on websites, view the short presentation on Slideshare by Kristen.
How can I use a Feed Aggregator to follow RSS feeds?
When RSS feed links are copied into an RSS reader such as Google Reader(web based), Feeddemon (for MS Windows), or NetNewsWire (Mac OSX), the user has “subscribed” to the feed and will be able to viewsummaries of the latest content from the subscribed Web site from within the RSS reader. By subscribing to multiple feeds in an area of interest, or “aggregating” feeds, users can user their RSS reader applications to browse, search, and sort content from many Web sites without having to visit them individually.
This capability can save a great deal of time and allow users to use information from the Web much more productively.
For this week’s screencast, I’ve created a brief demonstration of how to use the Google Reader RSS application to subscribe to an RSS-enabled Web site. If you are new to the idea of using a feed reader, it’s probably best to start out with using Google Reader. However; there many different feed readers available for any platform with a variety of interfaces. Here’s a chart comparing the different features of three popular feedreaders: Bloglines, Google Reader, and Newsgator with a list of pros and cons for each. If you are looking for a list of feed aggregators and tools, take a look at Mashable’s Ultimate RSS Toolkit. RSS feeds and RSS readers can be used to easily and effectively keep up with the latest news headlines, journal abstracts, blog entries, and organizational activities.
Are you currently using an RSS reader application to make the Web’s latest, greatest content manageable and useful? Can you provide any examples of great RSS-enabled Web sites? Please leave your ideas in the comment section or email them to me at jbehnke@fordham.edu or Kristen at treglia@fordham.edu. We would love to hear from you!!!
The universities’ “MyFiles” system provides all faculty, staff and students with up to 10GB of secure space to store , share, and back up their data files.
While the Web-based interface for MyFiles provides adequate functionality for backing up and viewing files, it is limited in the sense that you must in most cases copy your files to your computer’s Desktop before you can edit and save changes to them (Windows XP users can use Webfolders to get past this).
Once this connection is established, you will be able to open, edit, and save data to your MyFiles account without ever having to copy it to your hard drive; as long as you are connected, it will appear as if your MyFiles data is stored on your Mac instead of on the network.
For Mac users, this procedure greatly enhances the utility of MyFiles and will probably be their preferred method of accessing MyFiles data.
I’d very much like hear some feedback on this method of using MyFiles; let me know how it works out!
-Jim
(behnke@fordham.edu)
Photo Credit MacBook by kattni
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
As you know, in the Faculty Technology Centers, you have access to
Adobe Acrobat Professional and can create/edit PDFs. Some of you might also have the software on your office computer, but many of us do not have this product at home. In this week’s screencast, Jim will show us some of the free tools you can find on the web when you find yourself on a computer without Acrobat Pro.
Hello ITAC blog readers, my name is James Behnke. I have been working with the Psychology Department since last November as their IT Liaison and will be a regular weekly contributor to this blog.
Having worked as a teacher, technical trainer, and I.T. Administrator for a school district, I am keenly aware of how important it is to foster information technology literacy an educational institution. In my efforts to assist members of the psychology department with their utilization of information technology resources, I’ve recently gotten into the habit of creating brief, Web-based multimedia tutorials commonly referred to as “screencasts”. These screencasts, such as the one below, demonstrate the technical operations and software features needed to accomplish discrete, useful tasks using various computer applications.
Going forward, I will be contributing more screencasts to this blog on a variety of topics that I hope will be of interest to members of the Fordham community and serve to raise awareness of the many useful information technology resources available to them.
I am hopeful that these posts will generate a lot of user feedback that will enable me to better target the needs of readers. If you have any questions or suggestions, I can be contacted by email at behnke@fordham.edu.
For the curious and those who want to explore creating their own screencast software demonstrations, the application that I use for creating screencasts is Jing. It is free and very easy to use.
