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If you've watched my videos and/or read some of my other posts, you'll likely remember that I'm an RSS junkie - can't live without it. My feed reader of choice is Newsgator's FeedDemon - and they just announced that it is now FREE. I paid about $30 for it 3-4 years ago (back when Nick Bradbury was sole owner) and it was money well spent. Now that it's free, I hope more folks will learn of the goodness that is RSS :)

Download it here - http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/free-demon-yes.html

Here's a few of my favorite feeds to get you started:

General Tech:

• Slashdot Developers
• Valleywag
• DotNetJunkies.com
• Mary Jo Foley's blog

SQL Based

• Bob Beauchamin's blog
• Kalen Delaney's blog
• Ken Henderson's blog
• Adam Machanic's blog
• Jamie Thompson's SSIS blog

.NET Based

• Roy Osherove's blog
• Jesse Ezell's blog
• Jon Galloway's blog
• CodingHorror
• Scott Mitchell's blog
• Scott Guthrie's blog
• Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen

Here's How I "Do" RSS

RSS, to me, is a lot like data mining - unless you have a lot of data to work with, it's not that useful. What I like to do is to collect tons and tons of feeds (organized into categories) and I have FeedDemon set to update all of my feeds every 5-10 minutes. I have about 1,600 feeds right now in my OPML file that I am monitoring every 5-10 minutes - yikes! That means that, every time any one of the 1,600 feeds posts a new entry, FeedDemon downloads it and I can view it inside FeedDemon - without having to go to that website.

But that's too much info to be useful, isn't it?

Yes. Sometimes I forget to open FeedDemon and, if it goes 2-3 days without launching, I'll have 1,500-2,000 new articles to read. Forget that - you'll never care about or read 1,500-2,000 articles 2-3 days.

So what do you do?

Watches Are the Key to Using FeedDemon Effectively (IMO)

Here's what I do:

1. I go collect a ton of RSS feeds about a particular topic (Audio Visual - TVs and Stereos, for example)
2. Create a watch that looks for certain keywords
1. Sharp Aquos
2. 1080p
3. free dvd
3. Sync the feeds every 10 minutes
4. Configure FeedDemon to notify me via a popup whenever someone has been added to the watch

The better your watches, the better you'll enjoy FeedDemon. The more feeds you have, the more you'll likely enjoy FeedDemon. One word of caution: some sites are duplicates and post duplicate stories. This can lead to duplicates showing up in your watches. So look for that and prune your feed list periodically.

Go download FeedDemon and get started with it - it's awesome!

http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/free-demon-yes.html

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 8:54 AM