Happy RSS Awareness Day! Posted at 9:36 am by Elaine Helm Today, it turns out, is RSS Awareness Day. Only a small fraction of people who use the Internet understand and use RSS, so the holiday is intended to get the word out about this wonderful Internet tool.
RSS feeds have become an Internet standard for sharing frequently updated content online. The acronym stands for Real Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are useful for following what's new on your favorite Web sites and for those sites to distribute their content beyond their own Web pages.
Even if you don't use RSS, you probably recognize this symbol: . Wherever it appears, you likely will find an RSS feed.
As I explained in an earlier post, you need a feed reader to translate the RSS code into something you can understand. Many RSS readers, including Google Reader, MyYahoo and Bloglines, are available for free.
If you've never tried using RSS before, get started today with a free RSS reader and some of the feeds for your favorite bloggers and sections on HeraldNet.com.
Most popular stories April 21-27 Posted at 10:55 am by Elaine Helm Traffic accidents and crime stories dominated the most read lists last week. The 10 most popular stories were:
Watch out for fake IRS e-mail Posted at 1:29 pm by Elaine Helm Poor taxpayers. It's bad enough the government makes us go through the hassle of filing and paying taxes in the first place. But now scammers are picking on us, too.
I found a message stuck in my junk mail filter this morning from irs@irs.com (the address is a dead giveaway -- the real thing would be from irs.gov). It promises to get me my refund sooner if I provide my social security number, debit or credit card number and PIN, birth date, address and phone number. Yeah, right.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The IRS never initiates communication via e-mail, according to its Web site. The site has a slew of resources to protect yourself from "phishing," the term for when scammers pose as legitimate businesses or agencies and ask you to provide personal information. ... [Read More] E-mail | Print | CommentNEW!
April 15
Most popular stories April 7-13 Posted at 1:12 pm by Elaine Helm As I suspected it would be, the most read story on HeraldNet last week was the one about the teenager who faked being pregnant to see how people would react. The teen's video diary entry has been viewed more than 2,700 times so far on YouTube.
The most popular stories for the week of April 7-13 were: