WHY? You know there is a way to get your website updates in one place, you just need that place!

Earlier this week we talked about why it’s not such a bad idea to subscribe to RSS way of life. Now that you’ve tasted the Kool-aid, let’s get into how you can actually do this!

We Need a Reader

Each item of RSS is called a feed. It’s like the websites send out a feed of information but we need something to capture the feed. That device is a feed reader (also sometimes referred to as an aggregator).

Feed readers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Instead of going through all the options, I’m going to show you my favorite – Google Reader. It’s a free website that requires a Google account (if you have gMail then you’re set). So head over to Google Reader (aka: gReader) and sign up and/or in with your Google account.

We Need to Grant Permission

Subscribing — this model for receiving information has been around for a long time. Just like when you subscribe to a magazine, you’re giving them permission to send you the latest information. Now that we have something to read our feeds in, we need to go give some websites permission to send us the latest!

Now, remember last week I told you that the Firefox browser has all sorts of goodies built in? This is one place it pays off. To get ready for some streamlined subscribing, in the Firefox menu click on Tools and then Options. You will then see a window that has an option for Feeds. Click it and change the settings to “Subscribe to the feed using:” and select Google. Press OK.

Now, let’s head over to 170spoons.com (if you’re not already here) because you want to make sure you always get the best tools, tips, and tutorials for technology! Look up a the web address bar and you’ll see at the end of it a little orange icon which means this website has a RSS feed for you.

Editor’s Note: This will also work if you type a http://www.CruTech.org in.

Click the icon and you’ll be taken to a page that has two options. We want the one that says “Add to Google Reader”. Click that blue box to add it.

Once you have clicked that button you should be taken back to your Google Reader with 170spoons.com loaded and ready to be read! Note that the number beside the item (in this case 2) is how many unread items you have for that feed. Your number may vary.

If you want to use a different browser or a different reader, you can still go through the subscribing process. Go to your website and when you get there, look for the RSS button that on most pages looks like this.

Later in the week I’ll give you some tips on how to use Google Reader better and faster. But for now, you should be set up. Go around to different websites that offer updated content and see if they have a RSS button somewhere and load up your reader!

I know many people reading this use different readers than Google. What is your favorite and why?

WHY? Going to one website for many updates is better than going to many websites with no updates.

Ever since I began talking about opening this site for tools, tips, and tutorials for technology, I began getting requests to explain something called RSS. I decided I’ll take a few days to go over this because it’s just that good! Before you freak out and stop reading, all I ask is you hang with me a moment. I’m going to take us through this nice and easy and I think you will at least know why RSS can be a very useful thing for you.

Let’s get the irrelevant stuff out of the way first. RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. All that means is that there are agreed-upon rules for people to allow their online content to be rebroadcast somewhere else. Just like when you watch an old rerun of The Brady Bunch, Frasier, or What’s Happening? what you are watching is the syndication of it. Like I said, this stuff really is irrelevant for us.

Today it’s my goal to get you motivated to the idea of taking advantage of RSS. Later in the week we’ll get into some more tips of how to use it better.

The Problem

Let’s say you have several websites you like to check for new articles or content on a regular basis (like CNN.com, 170spoons.com, Facebook, and your best friend’s blog). The traditional way to find out what’s new is to either remember all of the web addresses and go there, or go through your bookmarks clicking on each. When you get to the sites, you may not be able to tell what’s new, what you’ve already read, or if there is anything new at all. It could turn into a colossal waste of time!

If only there were some way to have these updates delivered to us when those websites have an update…

eMail is to People as RSS is to Websites

I’ve seen many, many attempts to explain what RSS is and I’ve tried different analogies in the past and I think this is the one that makes the most sense. When you get an email, you are basically getting an update from a person. When you get a RSS update, you get an update from a website. To read eMail you need an eMail reader (like Outlook, gMail, Yahoo Mail, etc). To read RSS, you need a RSS reader.

What RSS is Solving

When you set up a RSS reader and tell it which websites to check for updates, you then have one place to go for all of your website updates. You don’t have to go all over the web to find anything new. Just go to one place and it’ll tell you if there is anything new or not in all of the sites you’re monitoring. In fact, using a RSS reader allows you to monitor even more sites if you like since you’ll only know when something is new.

Later this week we’ll go over how to use RSS to your advantage. Today I just wanted to help you understand a bit about what RSS is.

RSS in Plain English

I admit that I may not have done the best job in explaining RSS. So let me show you a short video that was made about a year ago called RSS in Plain English.

If you use RSS to receive notifications of new website content, leave a comment as to why you do it this way instead of the traditional way.

This week I’m going to take a “week off”. It’s not that there won’t be anything posted this week for you to learn, it’s that it won’t be me writing those posts. I’ve asked Rob Williams (former staff at HQ in Orlando) to share some posts that he wrote a few weeks ago for his own tech blog 170spoons.

In celebration of May 1st, which is both May Day and RSS Awareness Day, they will discuss the nature and advantages of newsfeeds (also known as RSS or “Really Simple Syndication”). Most of you reading this are already taking advantage of a form of RSS Feeds in the email that is sent out when I update the site.

Let me suggest at this point that you go ahead and sign up for a Google/Gmail account as it will help you understand better what he is talking about in the upcoming posts.

See you all again next week!

For those of you who have wanted to write comments on the posts, you should be able to now. I’ve been wrestling with the comments options since I started the site. I’m still not sure if it’s going to work right, but I’ll keep an eye on it.

Comment away!

We’re all familiar with PDFs, those documents that you get that you can always read but you can never edit. They have been pretty standard for a number of years now (they’ve existed since 1993), but they’re on the brink of becoming the standard for documents on the internet (there are actual standards for content on the Web).

They are convenient because you don’t have to worry about whether or not your friend has Word, Publisher or whatever other program you’ve created your document in – they can still read it. It’s also great for sending out prayer letters by email so that you’re sure that all of your supporters can read it – I mean the program to read them is even free!

For a long time I was confused about how many people seemed to be able to create PDFs yet I was completely not able to make them… then I found out how.

Now, from what I understand, the ability to save a document to a PDF is native to OS X so those of you who are Mac users have this pretty easy. We’re going to walk through how to install a PDF Converter as a printer on your system. The program that I use is CutePDF.

CutePDF allows you to create a PDF document in any program that you can print from. When I need to print off a Bible study to send to a student – “print” it as a PDF and email it. When I have a receipt online that I want to save – “print” it as PDF and save it on my hard drive. When I want to save a webpage complete with all of the content as a single file – “print” it as a PDF and I can open it quickly whenever I want.

First, go ahead and download it from here (Windows required), you’ll also need to download a converter called Ghostscript that is also linked on the page (you can get it here). On the CutePDF page they’ll look like this image to the left.

Now all you have to do is run the CuteWriter.exe and converter.exe files that you’ve just downloaded and you’ll have CutePDF installed in your options whenever you want to print something. When you “print” with it, it will give you an opportunity to save it as a PDF where ever you want.

Now you can create PDFs!

I love keyboard shortcuts. The more you can do without having to move your hands from keyboard to mouse the better – and the quicker!

Today I want to share a list of what you can do with the Windows key. Honestly, do you know all the stuff that you can do with it? For the purposes of this post, we’ll use the letter W as the Windows key.

W: Opens Start Menu

W+ E: Opens up Windows Explorer

W+ R: Opens the Run command.

W+ U: Opens Utility Manager

W+ L: Log Off

W+ F: Search files on your computer

W+ D: Show Desktop [will switch back and forth from all minimized and back again]

W+ F1: Windows Help Menu

W+ Pause/Break: System Properties

W+ Tab: (Vista) Cycles through open programs in the cool-looking Aero slideshow.

W+ Tab: (Other Windows) Cycles Through Buttons in Taskbar

W+ M: Minimize all open windows. (Similar to W+D, but with less power.)

W+ Shift+M: Maximize the windows you had open before minimizing

W+B: Set focus to the first System Tray Icon [which is the arrow if you enable the Hide Inactive Icons option]

CTRL+W +F: Search for computers

Do any of you have shortcuts that you use often? Are there any similar shortcuts for Macs?

From [MojoStix]

In my last post I pointed out that I am a fan of Google products, in the post before that I shared the advantages of the Gmail (Google Mail) application – which I do believe to be even superior to Outlook when combined with other applications that Google offers. I even walked you through, step-by-step, the process of signing up for a Gmail account.

Well, today I want to share another walk-through, this time we’ll take a spin around what you can see from the Inbox view. Click the image to start the walk-through

Let me know in the comments if you’ve decided to set up a Gmail account.

Let’s be honest, we all have biases. For those of us who have had a part in ministry that includes active evangelism, it’s a part of every day life; people look at and interact with the world differently.

There is a similar truth in technology. People have differing uses and preferences when it comes to how they want their technology to look, work and approach the tasks they have to do. As I have looked at the list of people who have subscribed to these posts I notice that there are some people who will not always find my posts interesting because they’re using programs, platforms or operating systems that I don’t use and therefore know very little about.

CruTech is an outgrowth of a mentality of getting the most out of your technology without having artificial limits placed on you; this leads me personally to advocate for a number of technologies and systems that may or may not catch you in stride. While I don’t have the time (or much interest) in getting to know these systems, I do want CruTech to serve you as well as possible; if you are (or know someone on staff who is) better versed in things that I don’t know about or use I would love to have you (or them) become a the second author of content here. Feel free to contact me by leaving a comment below.

As a semi-pro wrestler I once heard about once said, “Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.”

Stuff I am a fan of:
• Open Source software
• the Windows operating systems
• Google products and services
• being able to tell my computer what to do rather than having artificial limits placed upon me
• web-based technologies

Tech stuff I know little about or don’t particularly like:
• Macs
• Internet Explorer or Opera
• Microsoft itself
• proprietary software
• overpriced technology that is available for free or cheap

Yes, I said I don’t really like Macs, I do understand that they can be very useful for those of you who are doing visual design, audio or video editing. They are not really any more useful or easy to use than Windows machines and are far more susceptible to viruses and other attacks than they were in previous generations. On the other hand, I would love to have someone writing for CruTech that knows Macs well and can help those of you who read to use them more powerfully as well.

I just wanted to make sure you all knew where I was coming from. I will focus a lot on web-based technologies which are open to use on Windows, Macs or Linux machines so don’t click that unsubscribe link just yet!

I do all of my emailing through a single Gmail account. I am able to do this simply because of Google’s amazing thoroughness in the implementation and design of Gmail. Let me list off a few of the many advantages and post a walkthrough of how to sign up for a Gmail account.

Some advantages:
• Free. Anyone can sign up for it. There are extras that you can pay for, but not really necessary.
• Storage space. By the time you read this there will be more than 6.5 GB (gigabytes) of it. If every email you send or receive is 50 KB (pretty big for an email without an attachment) that allows for almost 21,000 emails before it’s full. (You can add 10 GB more for $20/year.)
• Growing storage space. It’s estimated that Gmail is adding 3.3 MB daily (67 of those hypothetical emails).
• POP and IMAP access. POP and IMAP are the primary ways that programs like Outlook and Thunderbird bring in emails from the web. This can make your email available anywhere.
• Incoming POP access. This is how I do all of my email from my Gmail account. You are able to have Gmail pull in your USCM.org (or CCCI.org) email and store it in Gmail – this also works for your internet service provider account (Verizon, Comcast, etc.). You can even have Gmail send emails from those accounts.
• Keyboard shortcut navigation. This is a great feature in any program for working quickly and efficiently, we’ll learn about this in future posts.
• Multiple accounts built into one. If you sign up for johnny.crusade@gmail.com you also own johnnycrusade@gmail.com, j.o.h.n.n.y.c.r.u.s.a.d.e@gmail.com (or anything in between) as well as johnny.crusade@googlemail.com. You can also add words to it with a plus; for example johnny.crusade+ebay@gmail.com for all of your eBay stuff so if you start getting spam you know who has been selling your email address.
• Search don’t sort. Remember, Gmail is from Google – a search engine. Gmail can instantly find old emails as you search for them. It’s quick and thorough. There are also advanced searches that you can use… we’ll look at them closer in a future post.
• Sort if you must. Gmail can sort emails just like Outlook into categories (called tags) – the main difference is that you can have multiple tags on one email. So, if you have a student who is a leader at one of your schools but is also attending the summer project you’re directing you can label his email both “Podunk State” as well as “OCMD Summer Project”
• Filters. You can have Gmail automatically filter things depending on what email it was sent from, or sent to, or words that are in the email itself… or by about a thousand other things.
• Threaded Conversations. Gmail will group related emails together as a “conversation” so that you don’t have to flip back and forth between individual emails between you and someone else. It will group them together in order so that you can read them all at once. Honestly, this may be the main feature that changes the way you read email.
• FREE!

If I have convinced you (and really, what more could you ask for?) take a look at the walk-through that I put together a few months ago.

We’ll walk through the Inbox next.

Some of my most-used features of Firefox are the advanced bookmarking techniques. First is the “Keyword” feature. Let’s go through bookmarking a site and setting up and using the keyword feature to get into StaffWeb fast.

Click on the Bookmarks menu and choose Organize Bookmarks. If you click on the New Bookmarks button at the top left.

This box will pop up.

In Name you can put StaffWeb. In Location http://staffweb.ccci.org (or http://staff.uscm.org if you go there more often). Here’s the awesome part – just put the word “staff” in the Keyword box and hit OK.

Close the bookmark window, type “staff” into your location bar and hit Enter. Voilà! It goes right to the GCX login screen and to the staff site of your choice.

In my Firefox I have this set up for my email login, my feedreader, church website, router settings, ebay, online voicemail access, calendar and a number of other sites… if you combine this with the CTRL-L (or CMD-L for Macs) shortcut that takes your cursor directly to the Location Bar I can be to my Inbox in 5 keystrokes!