TechMaine hosts a technology awards gala every year to award various Maine technology companies. This year, Sephone is a finalist in three categories.
We wish the best to all of the other finalists.
What is RSSRSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way for web sites to relay their newly published content to you. It’s often used by blogs or news sites and very widely supported. Rather than going to a website to view the content, the content is “pushed” to you.
Instead of having to visit several websites to view their content, those same sites can just send their updates to you via RSS. This would enable you to just check one place for new information instead of going to numerous other sites.
It can help cut down on spam as well. With email, the sender decides if the recipient wants the message; with RSS, the recipient decides if they would like the information. Therefore little to no spam comes through RSS feeds.
In most browsers, an orange icon, similar to the one in this post will appear around the address bar. By clicking on it, you can see the feed. Sometimes you will see a link on a site called “RSS” or “feeds” as well.
You are going to need a feed reader. The feed reader is an application that subscribes you to the updates. This application wiill pull RSS feed data into one place for you to view. We can write volumes about the numerous applications, but we are going to stick to the basics.
Web Browser Based
A web browser based feed reader is one that you use with your web browser. Your web browser is what you view the internet with, like internet explorer, firefox or safari. With your browser you go to the feed reader site, login, and it will show you your feeds’ content. Here are a list of popular feedreaders.
Most of these are easy to setup and use. Plus they can be used for any computer that has internet access. The rest of these need to be linked to a single computer. If you don’t know which one of the below feed readers to use, try one of these. I personally use google reader.
Vista Based
Windows Vista has it’s own way of dealing with RSS feeds. Here are the basic steps.
Once you are subscribed it will show in your internet explorer. You can now add the feed to your vista sidebar or to your windows mail program.
Outlook
Inside of Microsoft Office, Outlook provides RSS functionality. If you have outlook installed, by clicking on the feed icon in the address bar, Outlook will subscribe to automatically.
Thunderbird
If you have Thunderbird installed, it makes a great feed reader.
Apple Mail
Nearly all blogs and news organizations have RSS feeds as well.
Have you ever wondered if people are talking about you on twitter. There is a relatively simple way to tell. Search.twitter.com is the place to go.
To put it very simply, search.twitter.com is like google for twitter and works much the same.
One of the very covenant features of this search is that the results can be tracked via a feed. Once I have this twitter search in my feed reader, any time somebody mentions me on twitter, I see it. This feed is available near the top right hand side of the search results. It’s the RSS icon, that says “Feed for this query” right next to it. For those of you who don’t know much about feeds, go back and read our feed reader article.
To really get the most of the this functional I recommend you use the plus and minus signs. Plus means that the search must contain that word and minus means that the search results must not contain that word. For example say I wanted to search for tweets that had ‘cream’ but not ‘ice’, then I would search from “-ice +cream“.
Everybody is abuzz about social media these days. For those whom are new to social media or don’t really know what it is, consider this post a bit of a primer.
What is social media?
It has because such a buzz word that gets injected into conversation, it is even a somewhat elusive term to define. We are going to stick to the most simple definition we can. Social media is the use of technology (mostly internet technology) to allow folks to publish content (text, images, or video mostly) that encourages interaction with others.
How is it different than traditional media?
In comparison to traditional media outlets (such as television, radio and print) there are numerous differences.
In some respects they are similar, a blog post may not be read by anybody, it may be read by millions. A TV show may never be watched by anybody, or by the millions.
What are some examples?
I think examples are some of the best ways to learn
But how can I use it?
If you are thinking, this is cute and all, but my time is precious, how do I use this to benefit myself, then this section is for you.
Social media can save you time. When you need to get the word out about something, a new product, service, or sale, it can be much faster to publish your information in one place and let everybody read that, instead of having to tell a bunch of people. Imagine if you are having a sale, you could via word of month, tell 200 people about your sale. That will take you a few hours and may span several days. If you have 200 people following you on twitter, it takes about 1 minute and it’s instant.
Social media can help you educate your customers. Lets say you offer three services, snow removal, landscaping, and trash removal. Lets say that 1/3 of your business comes from each service and you don’t have very many overlapping customers that use more than one service. By publishing various social media items, you can showcase your work to your customers that may only use one aspect of your business or didn’t even know you did more than one thing.
Social media can help you to find new business. By publishing your insights, views and work examples for the world to see, potential customers will see your abilities and you can increase they likely hood to use you in the future.
Where can I read more?
This is the first in a many part series about social media. Stay tuned for more.
On Feburary 18th, the new WABI.tv was launched. WABI TV-5 is a CBS-affiliated television station in Bangor, Maine. WABI was the first television station in Maine to go on the air when it began broadcasting on January 25, 1953. Also, they are the only locally owned and operated commercial station in Bangor. Leading news ratings for many years, WABI TV-5 is the only station in the market with a full schedule of live, local news that originates from Bangor.
Sephone is proud to work with WABI TV-5 on their new site. Some of the improvements on the new site are increased usability, RSS feeds, and faster page loads.
See the new site for yourself at www.wabi.tv.
As you may have heard some web companies are dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 (ie6 as it is often called). 37signals and google’s gmail have announced they are no longer supporting this browser. Others like Apple’s Mobile Me just don’t list Internet Explorer 6 as a supported browser. Still others like facebook, politely ask you to upgrade your browser.
But I use Internet Explorer 6
If you happen to be a user of ie6, you are not alone. As of today, Sephone sees slightly less than 20% of web surfers using ie6. We do recommend that you upgrade your browser to more modern one. There are several good ones to download, install and use. This is relatively easy to do and they are all free.
How do I know if I have ie6
Most operating systems and browsers have a menu item that tells you, try clicking Help than About. On the right, you can see a screen shot of a help menu from Internet Explorer 6. You can clearly see that it is Microsoft Internet Explorer and then the next line it says version 6.0.2800.1106. You don’t have to worry about the .0.2800.1106 part, if it says 6. anything, you have ie6.
Why are people not supporting ie6
This version was released in 2001. That is a long long time ago in web years, it’s very old. As a web development shop, ie6 has been a source of numerous headaches and frustrations. Web developers need to do extra work to make sure to works with these older browsers. Internet Explorer 6 also lacks some of the features that are needed by the modern web developer such as PNG alpha channel, box model, standards compliance and XMLHttpRequest (XHR).
Does sephone support ie6
While we do recommend that you upgrade your browser, Sephone does offer limited ie6 support on some of our products and services. We are slowly phasing out support though. As we do more and more development we are supporting ie6 less and less. The browsers we do support are firefox version 2 and up, Safari version 2 and up, Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and Google’s Chrome.
Getting the most bang for your buck is the goal of almost every expenditure that a person or company makes. Web development is no different. One of the keys in working with a development firm is communications. Properly relaying ideas back and forth is very important. Nearly all of the tips below involve some form of communication.
This means, more or less, knowing what you what. You don’t have to have everything spelled right out, but you should be able to, in a few sentences, say exactly what your project goals are. When thinking about project goals, always think about the end result.
Think about what you want your site/application to do when it’s done. Try to relay the idea of how this helps your business to your developer as well; this may help them have a better understanding of what you want.
Example goals:
Throughout the course of the project, the development team may have questions for you. Be as responsive, informative, and decisive as you can be. This will help the developers know what you want and will allow them to work as effectively as possible. Continually starting and stopping on a project makes it more difficult for developers to stay focused. Be prepared for their feedback as well. Most projects have several check-ups or milestones along the way with decisions to be made before you can move on to the next step.
Don’t be afraid to ask plenty of questions. You should understand what your developer is doing and why. That way, when a development company has a question, you will better understand why they are asking and the context of what they are asking. If you don’t understand what your development company is asking you, then ask them for more detail, so you can make an informed decision. Asking questions and discussing them also helps ensure that everybody is on the same page.
A lot of times your web development company might have some ideas you hadn’t thought of. Just like you have experience doing what your business does, web developers work on a lot of sites and might suggest some things they think will make your project better. Clearly communicate the end goals and anything that is crucial for your site to do, and let your development team work out the nuts and bolts of your site/application. When you see a development version of the site, again, give feedback and ask any questions you have.
When in doubt, always err on the side of simple. New ideas or features can always be acted upon later. It’s harder to fix a project that is hard to use, out of scope, over time, and over budget, then it is break up a project into several phases. Almost always, it’s better to have half the features fully implemented, than all of the features half-implemented.
What is a web browser
A web browser is a piece of software that you look at websites with. More than likely it’s what you are using to view this article right now. I wrote this article in a web browser. Many people think a web browser is how they “get on the internet” or how they “look at the internet”.
What is Firefox
Firefox is a web browser that is a product of a company called Mozilla. Its history dates all of the way back to the earliest days of the internet with the Mosaic web browser which became the Netscape web browser. Firefox is the chief rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and brought more secure and standards compliant browser to the general public that included new features such as tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, addons, and a search system that uses Google. Firefox at this time, has about a 17% market share. Firefox is available for nearly all versions of Windows, Macs and Linux machines.
What is Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer, often called just IE, is Microsoft’s Web browser. At this time it is the most widely used browser and comes pre-installed on all windows machines since 1995. The latest stable release is IE7. IE has been criticized in the past for the lack of full CSS standards support, lack of full PNG support. IE7 is better. IE8, their latest browser in beta right now, does comply with standards support unseen in any Microsoft browser before it. IE is available for all Windows releases.
What is Safari
Safari is Apple’s web browser, it was released in 2003 and has been included with every Mac since version 10.2. Safari has some of the best CSS support of any web browser available. Safari has a bookmark technology, and features a management scheme that functions like the iTunes jukebox software, integrates Apple’s QuickTime multimedia tabbed-browsing interface. A web search box is a standard component of the Safari interface, as are software services that automatically fill out web forms, manage passwords via Keychain and spell check entries into web page text fields. The browser also includes an integrated pop-up ad blocker. Safari is available on Mac OS X, and several Windows releases.
Which one do I use?
Well, that is a great question. It depends on what you like to do on the Internet. Here at Sephone, we are partial to Firefox because of the great development addons to help us do our job. Try all of them if you want and pick your favorite.
No matter what browser you pick, it’s important to make sure that your browser software and OS are updated with the latest patches on a regular basis.
Happy browsing.
What is a Podcast?
A podcast is a way to subscribe to an audio or video show and automatically receive new episodes. For example, I listen to the NPR morning stories. When they publish a new one, I want it to automatically be placed on my iPod. That’s exactly what a podcast does. In my media player, I have subscribed to the NPR morning stories podcast, and at night I plug my iPod into my computer. As I sleep at night, my media player will download the new episode from NPR and place it on my iPod so I have it in the morning, automatically.
Become a Podcaster
Do you have audio content that you wish to podcast? All you need is some MP3’s and a RSS feed. QuickTime Pro, GarageBand, and iWeb on a Mac would get you on your way. If that is a bit over your head, give us a call or send us an email, and we would be glad to help you out.
Microsoft has placed a bid to buy Yahoo for 44 billion, Microsoft’s largest acquisition so far. Read more at Fox News. Here are a few Sephone opinions on the announcement.
Alan:
It’s going to be really good or really bad. It could be good because yahoo/MS together can compete with Google, and both will get better. It could be bad because their cool things like del.icio.us and flickr could get bad because Microsoft has a rep for being bland, bloated and generic; Delicious and Flickr are lightweight and personal. It’s good that somebody is going to try to keep Google from running away with the show.
Joe:
It better not happen.
Kelly:
If the quality of Microsoft services will affect Yahoo and their services, then we are really in trouble.
Scott:
Good for Microsoft, bad for Yahoo.
Justin:
If the deal ends up going through, it will be up to Microsoft to decide how much freedom to give Yahoo’s properties like del.icio.us and Flickr to allow them to innovate and grow. Yahoo has a major place in the Web’s history, and it’s still the top site in terms of traffic. What would the combination of Live Search and Yahoo mean for Google and the Web in general?
Sephone is a web development company located in beautiful downtown Bangor, Maine.
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