Archive for the 'Development' Category

Page 2 of 5

My Neumont Educational History Part II

Published October 16, 2009 in Development and Life. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

After the great response I got from my previous post on my Neumont Educational History (http://www.paulrohde.com/my-neumont-educational-history/) Several e-mail, comments, and questions later, I’ve decided it’s time for a batch of Q & A to answer additional questions. I recently received an e-mail from a student that had found my website through the Neumont website, I feel it sums up many of the questions I have been asked since my previous post:

Mr. Rohde,

I am currently a high school senior at [omitted]. I am currently in the process of searching for colleges, and Neumont has presented itself to me as being a very unique school for computer science. Programming has been my passion since a very young age, and I hope to go to a college that has a reputable computer science program. While on the Neumont website, I happened to stumble across your blog. To be completely honest with you, your website blew me away. Your fusion of stylistic art and coding are breathtaking- I hope to one day be able to create the same sort of digital art that you have.

That said, I had a few questions regarding Neumont that can only be answered by an alumni. Neumont strikes me as being almost a technical school due to the nature of its program, and although the 2 year degree is definitely a bonus, I do wonder if they cut out the more “traditional” topics thus harming what would otherwise be a well-rounded education. Do you believe that they sacrificed subjects, or were classes such as literature unnecessary because they did not feed into a science degree? I also read on your blog that you debated between Neumont and Winona; were you considering any other schools at that point? How did you hear about Neumont?

Regarding Neumont’s atmosphere, I read about the classes that you took, but you did not particularly go into detail about the campus life. What did you like about Neumont? Were there any glaring drawbacks? How was the food?
Lastly, the administration and cost. I have read from various sources that the administration was difficult to come in contact with; especially the financial aid officers. I’m not sure as to their accuracy, so I figured a former student would be a prime source of information. Secondly, were you offered much of a financial aid package? Ultimately, my college decision depends largely on a financial aid package, and information surrounding how Neumont goes about choosing how to distribute their money is rather vague. Do you believe that Neumont was affordable? Do you still have any debts? Do they have an unduly high interest rate?

Since Neumont is a fairly new school with a small population, articles regarding Neumont are few and far between. As such, I believe that a former student’s opinion on the matter would be greatly influential in my decision. Any input that you could give me would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time,

- Steven

First, many thanks for the awesome comments about the site, its one of those ongoing projects that is continually evolving and changing, so its appreciated when someone does enjoy it.

Neumont is not round.

Ok. Sentimental comments aside, let me do the best I can to answer your questions. Since I am a Neumont Alumni, do keep in mind that the school has been evolving over the past several years and that there have been many alterations to the main program since I started (Cohort 15, July 2007). So take what I say with a grain of salt. Get in touch with one of the Neumont Reps if you haven’t already since they *should* be able to answer more direct questions about the current state of the school and the primary CS degree program.

From my experience, Neumont is a very technical school, it has one degree (There was previously a business masters degree program at the school, but that has been put on hold and may or may not re-emerge), and it is very geared towards graduating high quality and hopefully well rounded CS students. Because the program is so tightly geared toward CS there are some areas and classes that I personally felt were lacking. For instance, I really wish that the mathematics program went further, by the time I started at Neumont I had already completed Calculus II at WSU (Winona State University) and was beyond the current mathematics courses offered at Neumont. In addition, they do lack some of the general classes that form the basis for other fields of study: Chemistry, higher level Mathmatics, Physics, History, Literature, Art(To be fair, they did have an introduction photography class, and the last two quarters when I was leaving they were adding in a digital media concentration with courses that are more artistically bent). Part of my own draw away from Neumont was the fact that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to grow in some of these other areas, I love photography, art, the more classical sciences, and there’s a part of me that really does miss not having more time to explore those other subjects for my own personal interest.

The question about well rounded-ness really boils down to this: Why are you going to school? If your goal is to get a degree, get a full time job in business software development, I honestly cannot recommend a better school. However, if your not sure you want to do business software, if your not sure you want to even DO software, or if your not passionate enough to pursue and devote yourself to it for the two and a half years it’ll take to get through the program, Neumont is probably not the place for you.

Hearing about Neumont

I first heard about Neumont sometime after taking my ACT a year early and getting piles of junk mail from colleges talking about the ‘college decision’ I would be making over the next year.

Right.

After two years of highschool at a private school I returned to being officially ‘home schooled’ after my sophomore year, enrolled in WSU via the PSEO Program (Post Secondary Education Option, basically, if your a good enough student and would like to take classes at the local college the state will pay for the tuition and books), and then spent the following year and a half taking a full load of college classes (plus two side classes at an online school the year I started). Sometime within that college span I began receiving mail from Neumont, glanced and discarded most of it into the large bin of college spam. After receiving several more mailings I did some research, ended up being contacted by a Neumont rep, and was invited to attend their ‘Geek Weekend’ where they flew out potential new students that were interested in the school along with a parent or guardian to visit, meet some of the students, etc… That trip was the turning point in my decision making process. During my time at WSU I was actively taking some CS classes, most of them in Java, most little console algorithm type problems and one cool little robotics project near the end in one of my classes. After a year and a half of WSU, and having had several years of my own personal experience doing web, C++, Visual Basic, Dark Basic, building several of my own small games, and working as a student programmer at WSU doing C#, ASP.NET, and Sharepoint development, I was completely outmatched by students in their second quarter at Neumont (6 months into the program) that I met that weekend. That was cool.

Yes, it was a hard decision, I had a good job for where I was, I could have continued at WSU, graduated with a lot of current job experience (Read: ~4 years if I had graduated from WSU), but it wouldn’t have challenged me as much or pushed me as far as I am today.

The Campus

First of all, Neumont is not a normal school. They are located in an office building that’s been converted into the University as it is today. In fact, there are other companies that have offices in the same building, at least when I was there. Since I’ve been there they’ve made some additions and changes to the building, there’s now a new computer lab complete with iMacs, the common area has a pool table and a large screen TV that students will bring in and hook up their 360, Wii, or PS3 to and play games. The school does have a reasonable catering service during lunch on school days, but nothing like a normal cafeteria. When I was leaving they were experimented with having another place come in on Fridays, so I’m not entirely sure as to the state of the school provided food. From what I’ve experienced however, most students will eventually move away from the catered food and get something nearby (which is what I eventually did), there is a Zupas across the the street and a coffee shop within walking distance, and there’s quite a few additional places a short drive away.

The campus “Housing” is two sets of apartments, one set is at The Falls at Hunters Pointe, the other is Sterling Village in South Jordan, both are about a 20 minute walk from the school (although most people tend take the shuttle or carpool). I was only in student housing for a year, when I first moved in, one of my roommates was also just moving in and the other was close to graduating. During second quarter after the senior in our house moved out we got a new freshman, who ended up moving out without telling any of us before the end of the quarter… Anyhow, after that first ~10 months a friend of mine and two other guy’s rented a 4 bedroom 3 story house for about what we were paying in student housing, so, I ditched Neumont housing and moved. As far as rules and regulations go for student housing (Yes, they are regulated) they aren’t too bad, you do need to keep the apartment clean and they do have inspections. You also can’t bring weapons into the apartment (no paintball guns, swords, non-kitchen-knives, etc…).

As far as ‘life on campus’ goes you have lots and lots of geeked out guys (And about a 50:1 guy to girl ratio) that live life on Mountain Dew, Guitar Hero, WoW, and DotA. They are the stereotype, and you will find them on almost every non Neumont campus you visit, but you’ll find a much higher concentration than you would elsewhere. However, there are many people there that really do take what they’re doing seriously, and are already well rounded individuals. I was never that ‘involved’ in the geek culture. It’s cool, I like parts of it, I’ve rocked my share of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and played my hours of Counter Strike. Still, I spent a lot of my time outside of Neumont towards the end of my time there. Most of who I considered my ‘good’ friends were up at the University of Utah and were not CompSci majors. I was involved in the photographic community, I did several photowalks, met lots of photographers and models, made some good friends there. I was involved in a church (Gateway Community Church), and had several friends through that. The community is out there, but you have to go to it, it’s not going to drop into your lap as much as it would at a “normal” University.

If you make good friends, keep in touch, work hard, help and teach others (not just giving answers), and really strive to be a personable, well rounded individual, you will be fine. The homework can be hard, and there are ALWAYS group projects that you’re in and will be working on. It’ll force you to deal with and work with other people and figure out how to make things work. From personal experience, it’s exactly what you’ll be doing in the real world.

Administration and Cost

I’m probably not the best person to answer a lot of these questions, but I’ll do what I can. Administration from my experience hasn’t been that difficult to get in touch with, I was always able to go to people and figure out what I needed when I needed it. However, I do know that in the past, people have had issues, specifically with tracking graduation credits. There was (or is) a student written program that allows you to track your progress towards graduation that I used, and it worked well. However, I would also go in and talk directly with the student advisers on a regular basis and verify that I was doing things correctly. There have been several occasions where people have been 1-2 credits short because they thought they were taking enough credits but didn’t take the time to go and check with advisers each quarter…

As far as finances go, I was able to get my loans through the Department of Education and Sallie Mae with my parents as co-signers on those loans. With the economy having tanked, and quite possibly still in the tank, I’m not sure how difficult it will be to get financing, it’ll really depend on your situation. I was lucky enough to not have to worry about it much or have deal with the financial aid department at school. I do know that if I had not received loans or financing, I would have had a VERY difficult (if not impossible) time going to Neumont. Again, this is where I would get a Rep, ask very specific, very direct questions. Make sure they give you an answer, that’s what their job is.

Was Neumont affordable? I made it through. I will be able to pay it off with my current job over the next ~3 years, and my interest rate seems rather standard as far as student loans go.

Was it a lot? Yes.

Was it worth it? For the field I’m in, Yes. For the contacts I made, the experience I gained, Yes.

Wrap Up

Neumont is a great school, for business software development. For what the school is and at the time I went through the program, I don’t know of any other degree program that could trump it. It does have a very narrow focus, it’s hard, it’ll make you learn, and you’ll be better for it. Like any school, you only get out of it what you put into it and there will always be people that don’t care, don’t work, fail out, and complain to all ends of the earth about how it’s the university’s fault or how this or that caused them to _____. Fill in the blank.

Work hard, do your best and you’ll be fine wherever you’re at.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to leave a comment, call me, send me an e-mail, I’ll do my best to get back to you when I can.

- Paul Rohde

Note: The opinions presented here are my own and do not in any way represent the opinion or position of my Employer or that of Neumont University.

What I do at Interknowlogy

Published August 18, 2009 in Development and Life. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I get asked this question a lot:

“So, what exactly do you do at your job?“

The most common answer is usually me fumbling through what a surface is, multi-touch, and ending with something about consulting, cool projects, and NDA agreements. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So, since a video is between 30-60 frames per second, that’s gotta be about a book right there, so I figured I’d give you a taste of what I do at my main full time job.

http://www.interknowlogy.com

A bit of background on the demo; You may remember this post about building a really simple P2P network, and is the foundation of what we were eventually building out here. The framework itself is built out into three distinct layers, each independent of each other and interchangeable. For instance, the demo here is showing a P2P network layer, which is very nice for small demos because there is very little configuration required. However, because this layer is independent of the others it would be trivial to write an enterprise level sever based implementation that could be used to conduct sessions anywhere in the world.

The second layer is the framework that we’ve built up to handle the logic of managing a remote session, adding / removing remotable objects, synchronization, passing through commands, and routing commands from the network up to the individual remotable objects. The final layer is the remoting piece individual controls. It’s a layer of logic that is attached onto existing controls. The cool factor of the way this is built is it allows for a huge degree of flexibility at a control level if you need it, but also the power of being able to drop in a few lines of code and have objects magically start controlling and presenting.

Hope you enjoyed it, and let me know what you think!

- Paul Rohde

Building a REALLY simple WCF P2P application

Published August 5, 2009 in Development. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Often times when I’m looking at playing with a new technology that it becomes extremely difficult to find a simple stripped down easy-to-use chunk of code that also walks through, in-depth, the concepts and reasoning behind the code. This particular code chunk began as I started exploring the Microsoft WCF’s P2P networking services and found a rather distinct lack of code that explained the hows and whys of building a Peer to Peer network.

P2P Basics

Ok. Low level building blocks.

First, everybody (who’s interested in P2P) should already understand the client server paradigm, if not, there are many wonderfully detailed articles to explain the details. In short we have N clients all connected to 1 server. Client A sends a message to the server, the server decides what to do, and then may or may not send a response to Client A and / or Client B, Client C… etc… In a peer to peer network on the other hand, everyone is the client, everyone is a server. Because of this, the client / server naming scheme goes away by popular vote and everyone is called a node or a peer. When a node is connected to other nodes that whole group is called a mesh (or graph, or cloud).

Now, in a pure P2P network there is no central authority to help or govern how nodes find each other to form a mesh or how meshes are initially created.  Every node is connected to some number of other nodes, which are then connected to more nodes and so on. When one node wishes to communicate with another node (or nodes) the message is first passed on to the nodes that the first node knows about. These nodes in turn pass along the message on to other nodes that they know about and so on until finally everybody has seen the message.

One of the best, and probably most used, examples of a peer to peer network is the chat room. Until someone creates it, the chat room does not exist, but once it’s created people can be invited, join, and send messages that appear on everybody else’s screen. Even if the original person leaves the chat room, the room still exists as long as there are participants logged in. Once the last person leaves the chat room no longer exists.

Ping – The P2P Application

Note: I really dislike configuration files in demos or tutorials unless it’s a large application or showing how a particular aspect of a configuration file works. The fact that I can tell a static factory to build me something with a string name that corresponds to another file that somehow gets found, loaded, and happens to reference compiled type that then has a hidden class generated that implements that interface and is passed, bugs me when I’m trying to learn something.

If your going to follow along with this, your going to need .NET 3.5 installed and be running XP SP3, Vista, Win7 or Server 08. Visual Studio doesn’t hurt either.

To set up your project crack open Visual Studio and spin up a new Console Application, call it SimpleP2PExample. Once you have that open go over to the project, right click and Add Service Reference to System.ServiceModel, this allows you to use .NET’s WCF stuff in your app. You can choose to split up each class or interface into its own file or not: Up to you.

IPing
    //Contract for our network. It says we can 'ping'
    [ServiceContract(CallbackContract = typeof(IPing))]
    public interface IPing
    {
        [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)]
        void Ping(string sender, string message);
    }

Alright, first of all, attributes. If you don’t know what they are, then here’s the low down mouthful one line explanation:

Attributes are essentially binary metadata associated with a class, method, property or whatever that provides additional information about whatever it’s “Decorating”.

The first attribute is the service contract. Wait a second. Contracts.

In our node-talking-to-other-nodes scenario, somehow they have to know how to talk to each other, if I asked what the size of the door was and you handed me a window, I have NO idea what that means or what that represents. A contract defines exactly what I’m telling you, what I’m expecting back, how, and when.

In this case we’re defining a contract that has one operation, a method called Ping. We know that when node A talks to node B that if node A says “Hey, Ping(“MyName”, “Hello.”) to Node B that node B will know what to do with that and how to pass it along to other nodes. It’s also specifies that I don’t expect Node B to give me anything back.

Now, the implementation.

PingImplementation
    //implementation of our ping class
    public class PingImplementation : IPing
    {
        public void Ping(string sender, string message)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("{0} says: {1}", sender, message);
        }
    }

Fairly simple, whenever we receive a ping from another node, this method will be executed.

The Peer Class

Alright, now the fun, magic, and games begin. We’re going to create a class called peer, which will contain all our service start / stop code and also hold our implementation of PingImplementation.

Peer
    public class Peer
    {
        public string Id { get; private set; }
 
        public IPing Channel;
        public IPing Host;
 
        public Peer(string id)
        {
            Id = id;
        }
    }

In order to identify an individual node in the network, so that we know who’s who and don’t get everything mixed up, it’s customary to have a unique Id that’s assigned to the peer. Now, we have two IPing variables, the best way to describe them would be incoming and outgoing. An instance of the PingImplementation class will go in Host since it will be receiving any incoming communication from other nodes; The Channel is used to communicate out to other nodes and is built up via a factory.

Peer
    public void StartService()
    {
        var binding = new NetPeerTcpBinding();
        binding.Security.Mode = SecurityMode.None;
 
        var endpoint = new ServiceEndpoint(
            ContractDescription.GetContract(typeof(IPing)),
            binding,
            new EndpointAddress("net.p2p://SimpleP2P"));
 
        Host = new PingImplementation();
 
        _factory = new DuplexChannelFactory(
            new InstanceContext(Host),
            endpoint);
 
        var channel = _factory.CreateChannel();
 
        ((ICommunicationObject)channel).Open();
 
        // wait until after the channel is open to allow access.
        Channel = channel;
    }
    private DuplexChannelFactory<IPing> _factory;

This is what we will use to start the peer.  This is the part where I’ve built up what could have been done in the configuration file with code instead.

Lets take it from the top.  First off, we have our binding; this defines what communication protocol we are going to be using, and as this is a PeerToPeer app… we use NetPeerTcpBinding().  You’ll also notice that in the next line I set the security mode to none; this is done for simplicities sake. There’s three types of security modes, including None, Message, Transport and TransportWithMessageCredential. Its a bit beyond the scope of this post, but Message security ensures that the message was not tampered with as it was passed from peer to peer, Transport security ensures that the connection between nodes is secure, and TransportWithMessageCredential does both.

Now, our application needs an endpoint, essentially, an service endpoint is a set of information that is exposed outside of the application (in this case on the network as well) so that others can access it. The endpoint defines the address it can be reached at, the contract, and the method that should be used to communicate. In this case, we build up our endpoint by using ContractDescription.GetContract to generate a contract class off of our IPing interface, our network type binding, and an endpoint address where this endpoint can be reached.

Finally, we create a new instance of our PingImplementation class as the Host, and we create our channel factory. A DuplexChannelFactory allows for two way communication, the first parameter is the object that you want to receive incoming calls, and the endpoint is where those calls are coming from. The factory then creates the channel and a whole bunch of magical things happen.

If you’ll remember, our channel is of type IPing, the Duplex Factory performs some magic and generates a concrete implementation of your interface (it also implements ICommunicationObject, which is why you’ll sometimes see people create another interface called something like “IPingChannel : IPing, ICommunicationObject”, it does make it so that you don’t have to cast it, but for the purpose of this post it’s not necessary). Imagine that it takes your interface, implements all the methods and properties with all the cool DuplexChannel code needed to talk back and fourth, creates an instance, and returns it to you.

Finally, I call open on my channel to let the world see that my brand new channel and endpoint are ready for business.

Peer
    public void StopService()
    {
        ((ICommunicationObject)Channel).Close();
        if (_factory != null)
        _factory.Close();
    }

Now, it’s all well and good, until your done. Then you need to close you channel and factory, this should be pretty self explanatory at this point.  Remember our channel is an ICommunicationObject in addition to being a IPing object, so we cast and close, then check to see if our factory is null, and if not, close that as well.

Threading The Peer Class

Something I chose to do was make the peer threaded. This allows me to drop it into an application, in a thread, and receive and push stuff into it at my leisure. To do this I add in a:

Peer
    private readonly AutoResetEvent _stopFlag = new AutoResetEvent(false);

This will allow me to block a method of the thread until I decide fire it (When I stop the peer).

Peer
    public void Run()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("[ Starting Service ]");
        StartService();
 
        Console.WriteLine("[ Service Started ]");
        _stopFlag.WaitOne();
 
        Console.WriteLine("[ Stopping Service ]");
        StopService();
 
        Console.WriteLine("[ Service Stopped ]");
    }
 
    public void Stop()
    {
        _stopFlag.Set();
    }

The run method embodies the lifecycle of this peer. When the peer thread starts into the run method it will start the service, wait until the stop flag is fired (when the Stop() method is called), and then stop and dispose the service.

Putting It All Together
Program
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            if (Process.GetProcessesByName(Process.GetCurrentProcess().ProcessName).Count() <= 1)
            {
                for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
                {
                    Process.Start("SimpleP2PExample.exe");
                }
            }
 
            new Program().Run();
        }
 
        public void Run()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Starting the simple P2P demo.");
 
            var peer = new Peer("Peer(" + Guid.NewGuid() + ")");
            var peerThread = new Thread(peer.Run) {IsBackground = true};
            peerThread.Start();
 
            //wait for the server to start up.
            Thread.Sleep(1000);
 
            while (true)
            {
                Console.Write("Enter Something: ");
                string tmp = Console.ReadLine();
 
                if (tmp == "") break;
 
                peer.Channel.Ping(peer.Id, tmp);
            }
 
            peer.Stop();
            peerThread.Join();
        }
    }

From top to bottom, the Main method of the application checks to see if it’s the first one of this application to have started up, if it its, then it starts four additional processes (Note that if you called your project something other than SimpleP2PExample, you will need to replace the the string in Process.Start to be the name as the executable file your project generates).

The run method is also fairly simple, it creates a new instance of the Peer class, assigns it a GUID, creates a thread for the peer’s run method, starts up the thread and pauses to wait for the peer’s thread to start.  We then enter a loop until the user presses enter without inputting any text. Any text that is put in is transmitted over the peer channel using the peer’s id and the message. Once we’ve finished, we stop the session and wait for the peerThread to exit and join back up with the main thread. We then exit.

Wrap Up

I hope this helps someone out there get a better understanding of the basic concepts of a simple Peer to Peer application. Feel free to leave feedback!

Paul Rohde

Hardware: Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB 7200RPM SATA Format Issues

Published May 2, 2009 in Development. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Recently, I purchased two 1.5TB Seagate hard drives with the intention of mirroring them and creating a stable drive to backup photos, store music and videos, and generally keep around large amounts of data. I got home, dismantled most of my mid sized tower to fit them in, plugged everything in and reassembled my desktop, booted up into Windows, and bam!

No additional hard drives.

Damn. Go into device manager, yep, they both show up.

What?

Ok… into Disk Management, Hey… my disks are offline. Ok, turn them on, setup a partition… Try to setup a mirrored partition… “Object does not support this operation” message box. Whatever… I’ll setup a simple partition, I’ll do the backup by hand or write a sync app. Startup the format process. Go.

[Next Day]

What? My drives aren’t formatted? I did it again, quick format, BAM “Windows was unable to complete the format.” How what?! Windows, not format something?! *insert sarcasm*

[End Result / Solution]

After wading through countless posts about people returning drives, calling them defective, blah blah blah, I start to see a pattern, the people who actually know what they’re talking about are mentioning motherboards, chip sets etc… and are suggesting seeing if you can format a portion of the drive.

Interesting, a portion of the drive? Try it… and HEY it works! I played with the numbers and stopped around a 1TB ‘working’ partition. Not ideal, but I knew now that the hard drives probably weren’t defective. After more googling, reading, and looking through several help and support links I found this little notice on Seagate’s site:

1.5TB (ST31500341AS) or larger SATA hard drive only showing 1.1TB capacity in Windows Vista [206391]

Hey… I wonder, I could only get my drives up to about that… when I was on Seagates site earlier searching I couldn’t find this, but this looks like exactly what my issue is. (It also contains download links and a detailed description of which chipset goes with which download.)

Long and the short is, if you have an Nvidia nForce * chipset on your motherboard, THAT is your issue. You have to go and get the driver downloads from Nvidia, install, restart, and THEN you can partition your drives. It also fixes the issue with setting up a mirrored drive, and now I have a nice shiny new 1.5TB mirrored raid drive in my computer.

Happy formatting,

Paul Rohde

What the Heck is RSS?

Published March 17, 2009 in Development, Life, Photography and Site Specific. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

How many of you have had this experience: Someone has this cool website and they come up and ask you some variation of the question “Hey, have you subscribed to my RSS feed?” you then give them a resulting blank, ‘what are you talking about?’.

As common and prevalent as Feeds are these days on news and blog sites, I’m continually surprised at how few people know about them or use them to collect all their interweb news.  Granted, it’s one of those fairly new technologies that has only emerged in the last decade or so, but it’s one of those things that is SO extremely useful to myself that I have a hard time imagining what I would do without it.  So rather quickly I’m going to cover the basics of what an RSS ‘Feed’ is, how to use it, and why in a way that hopefully everyone that is fairly familiar with the internet and computers can understand.

An RSS ‘Feed’ itself is just part of a web page.  Think of it as a special page that’s somewhat hidden away that you don’t see, but keeps track of everything that happens on the site.  Many people simply call it a ‘feed’ because it essentially feeds information to hungry people like yourself, not sure where or when that term was coined, but its a common part of the lingo.

Now, here’s the cool part, many of the applications you already use everyday that connect to the internet have the ability to ‘subscribe’ to an RSS feed.  Subscribing is a fancy way of saying that your telling the program where the RSS feed is so that it can get the latest and greatest data off of it.  There are a lot of applications that do this, your mail clients such as Outlook, Apple Mail, Entourage, Thunderbird etc… all have the ability to ‘subscribe’ to an RSS feed and here’s the really cool part, every time someone adds some news to there site it appears in your inbox almost like an e-mail would appear within a few minutes of that piece of news being posted.  Now you can go and look at it and read it at your own convenience.  Your web browser may also have the ability to subscribe to Feeds as well, in Firefox they are called ‘Live Bookmarks’ which appear as a folder in your bookmarks and contain links to all the latest posts.  Whatever program you decide to use is your own personal preference, I personally use a service called Google Reader, but there are many to choose from.

But how do I subscribe to a feed?

Usually, you will want to subscribe to a feed as you’re looking at someones site, (take mine for instance), sometimes the site will have a button with a ‘Subscribe to our site!’ button that you can click on, others may have a smaller link somewhere (I have one at the bottom of my site that says ‘Entries Feed‘). In Firefox, clicking on one of these links brings up a selection box that lets you pick what you want to use to subscribe to the feed.  Some sites however, won’t even have a link even though the site may have an RSS Feed built in.  In these cases you’ll have to figure out how your browser works, but usually there will be a visual que somewhere that you can subscribe.  In firefox, if you can subscribe you’ll see a button that looks like this:

rss

Depending on the site, it will bring up a little menu, just click on one of them and you can then pick what you want to subscribe with and your good to go! It will take some playing around with and experimentation, but in the end, it’s something that is VERY useful for keeping tabs on a lot of different information.

I hope this helps some people understand what RSS feeds are and how they can be used, if you have questions or need help, feel free to leave a comment!

Paul Rohde