Tony Bevilacqua

How are you reading this blog? Probably just browsing around, and you caught some freak ass link that somehow landed you on this page. Nice Job, read on, add me to RSS.

Wait… what is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel,” contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

Now that you are up to speed, it’s time to become an RSS master, and it doesn’t really take much effort at all to make it happen. See, I use a nifty little app called “NewsFire” developed by David Watanabe. This fantastically stable, and reliable RSS application has provided me with an oasis of streaming content delivered to my desktop every 15 minutes, for over 45 websites.

I am probably a more advanced RSS user than most, as I monitor quite a few feeds. I find this useful for:

• Tracking Software Updates from Companies I Purchases Products From
• Reading up on the next “Make Money Online” schemes from the SEO brigade
• Keeping up with corporate blogs, such as Apple, Microsoft Technet
• Read news headlines for Silicon Valley Gossip, Game Politics, and GamesPress
• Monitoring my own feeds, and the status of SpawnPoint.com
• and of course, keeping up on the activities of my friends.

Stop wasting your time “surfing the web” and let NewsFire bring the web to you, when something worthwhile is available to read. Go grab a trial copy of NewsFire right now… below are some of the great features:

A Dynamic Performance
NewsFire is the first RSS reader to use animation to alert you to news and convey meaning. Watch your feeds and groups swoop around as news streams in.

Intelligent Search
Search for news, blogs, and podcasts everywhere directly in NewsFire and save the results as live feeds. Even cooler, NewsFire articles show up in Spotlight.

Groups and Labels
NewsFire lets you group and label your feeds, so you control the news reading experience.

Smart Feeds
NewsFire takes feed organization to the next level, letting you create smart feeds that match whatever criteria you want.

NewsFire Main Window

NewsFire Preferences

NewsFire Viewing Blog + YouTube

Are you on a server that shares it’s IP with many clients? Are you guaranteed a “dedicated IP” and not really sure if your host is really providing you with that service? MyIPNeighbors uses Reverse IP DNS technology to check the records that exist for your IP address.

This is a demonstration with tonybevilacqua.net, which is hosted on Site5.

Just a note on Site5, they have been a fantastic host, and I have been with them for several years. Recently I converted Lucas, a programmer for SpawnPoint over to Site5: “It’s one of most pleasant web hosting experiences I have ever had”. Anyway….

My Site5 package provides me with a dedicated IP address. I was humbled to see only domains that belong to me, pointed at this address. Although I have a dedicated IP address with my Site5 account, this is still hosted on shared hardware; nothing really interesting to see here.

This is a demonstration with toph.ca, which is hosted on MT.

Christoph hosts toph.ca on a Media Temple’s (gs) Grid-Service“. MT doesn’t provide a dedicated IP with his package - you can find out some interesting information with this tool… like who your IP neighbors are! In the query below for “toph.ca”, you can see a variety of other sites that are hosted at Media Temple.

Rajan Sodhi, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for PEER 1, blog reads of additional videos on the way from their Viral Marketing Series “Growing Pains”. The first of the series, originally uploaded in October 2007 has already yielded over 52,000 views.

If you haven’t seen the first video, click here. The team has posted some production pictures here.

We have just completed filming episodes 2 and 3 of PEER 1’s “Growing Pains” series (episode 1 has reached 50,000+ page views on free video hosting site Viddler). Filming took place last week on location in New York City. We hope to have both episodes ready to go in the next month or so. To see photos from the film shoot, click here.