Skip to Content

Submit your nominations for the Luxist Awards' Best in Decor
AOL Tech

RSS feed posts

Filed under: Text, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Productivity, Web services, Freeware, BlackBerry, iPhone, web 2.0

RSS SMS for your cell phone: annoying or useful?

RSS SMS for your cell phone: annoying or useful?
At first, it sounds like a texting nightmare from hell, but RSS via SMS has a place in our world through Web-Alerts, a small web experiment that may get lost in the vast internet desert that is web 2.0 failures. The service sends you a text message for every update to a chosen site's RSS feed.

The service is simple and easy to use. When you first visit the site, it'll ask your to enter a web address. If it finds an RSS feed for your chosen site, it'll ask you to enter your cell phone number. Should any updates happen to your chosen feed, a preview of the update will be forwarded to your phone. Removing a subscription is easy enough. "Just open the link in your text message and choose 'My Alerts' to remove any alert you are subscribed to." Furthermore, you can enter a keyword with your phone number so that you'll only be forwarded updates via SMS when they contain the keyword.

This could be extremely useful for someone closely watching a specific topic such as a stock broker. It could also become extremely annoying if you find yourself answering your phone every ten minutes to stop the latest SMS from incessantly vibrating in your pocket. Our advice: use wisely.

[via The Boy Genius]

Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Open Source, Browser Tips, Social Software

Flock 0.9 takes off tomorrow



Flock, the Mozilla based web browser still under development in private beta, is getting a nice overhaul with its 0.9 release tomorrow. If you're not familiar with Flock, it was released in 2005 with much anticipation and hype as the social network browser. Flock was created to integrate various social networks into one browser platform so you could conceivably post items to your blog, update your Facebook page, upload to Flickr and all the while stream YouTube videos.

It didn't live up to its hype for various reasons and some would argue, Firefox accomplishes all these social network tasks with their never ending inventory of useful add-ons.

However, the blogosphere's consensus is Flock 0.9 is a bird of a different feather (no more bird references, we swear) and is quite positive about Flock's new makeover. Here are some nifty features:

My World: Flock tells you when your friends have new photos and videos and when you have new feeds. My World gives quick access to your recently visited favorite sites as well.

Account Detection:
Informs you when there are available feeds and media streams on a page and when your account log-in can be configured with Flock.

Video Support: Find YouTube and Truveo videos with the Media Minibar.

Online Favorites: Easily post your favorites to del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.

Drag'n'Drop: Drag and drop photos and images from the Web Clipboard to webmail, comments, blogs, etc.

BlogEditor:
Added Blogger and LiveJournal support. Also, now you can preview what your blog post will look like before pushing 'Publish.' Tags are now enabled and have included Technorati, Livejournal and Blogger-specific tags.

Photo Uploader:
Edit options for a specific photo or the whole batch; easily set photo to commonly selected sizes

Flock has these media apps covered:

Blogging: Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga, Wordpress.com, Typepad
Media: Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube
Bookmarks: del.icio.us, ma.gnolia

We realize you can't have everything, but where's Twitter? New guy on the block, Pownce? Maybe we can expect to see Flock support these additions in the 1.0 release sometime this fall.

Flock runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Thanks FF!


Filed under: Internet, Web services, Mozilla, Yahoo!

Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 Fixes Add to My Yahoo! Problem

Add to My Yahoo!Have you ever tried to click on the "Add to My Yahoo!" button while in Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Search results pages or some other Y! property only have have it say the feed is invalid? That's a big WTF moment for me that has happened time and time again. Very frustrating.

I recently installed the new Firefox 2.0 beta 1 release and noticed it can subscribe "web feeds" (aka RSS feeds) to your RSS reader (either Bloglines, iGoogle/Google Reader, My Yahoo or a program on your computer) when you click the RSS or XML button on the page or the one that appears via auto-discovery in Firefox's address bar. Go to "Tools - Options... - Choose Feed Reader" to configure.

I didn't think much about this until I encountered another WTF moment. I clicked on the RSS icon in my address bar and viola! It was accepted when the "Add to My Yahoo" button attempt was refused. Sweet!

You could say Firefox does Add to My Yahoo! function better than Yahoo! does.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio