Emerging Technologies in STC

NOTE: I'll expand this entry later when I get a second (or one of you steps up). But for now, since people have questions, I'm putting up some small notes.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, will make your life much easier because it will help move all the various things you need to check for this class into one place. David managed to set up his RSS in such a way that all the tweets, all the FB updates, and all the blog posts into his. I use an aggregator called Bloglines to read 135 blogs each day -- a number I could never keep up with if I was clicking on them individually. Here's a screenshot of what a typical RSS reader interface looks like while you're using it.

You don't need to know code or even how this works in order to set it up. Seriously.

Here is a pretty good one-page intro to RSS. Here is a quick little tutorial.

Here is a link to Bloglines, which will aggregate anything with a feed, not just blogs.
Here is a link to Google Reader.
NetNewsWire, a premium reader, is now offering a free lite version.
If you use Safari or Firefox, they also have built-in aggregators. Checking the Help pages will, well, help you with that.

If you are among the happy few in the class who already grok the magic of RSS and you use a different reader, pipe up in the comments (or volunteer to flesh out this post!). kthxbai!