Setting up RSS Reader

[crxbnt]

So I finally am setting up another RSS reader after losing the Google Reader so many months ago. But it has been so long since I have done this I can't remember what the feed is for the site. Can anyone tell me what it is? I am using G2Reader as I have heard some fairly positive things about it, and it is the same price that Google was, FREE!

Thanks.

Crxbnt

[gnume]

heres the link : http://forums.sennadar.com/feed.php
you can find it in the source code of any page

[Fawks]

I have never truly understood what RSS feeds are. Or, for that matter CSS. I can do a little HTML editing, but JAVA, php, flash, SQL just roll on past me. Anyone want to share a little in depth explanation to someone who still uses the cmd prompt for some tasks in winder$ 7?

I did have two semesters of SQL in college but never was taught how to connect a SQL window to html. Two semesters of COBOL?!? Useless.

[knw257]

Well, I use a Chrome add-on called 'RSS Live Links' myself. It's useful for keeping up with a number of RSS feeds, including these forums for monitoring new releases. Very customizable, and pretty easy to set up and use.

Fawks wrote:
> I have never truly understood what RSS feeds are. Or, for that matter CSS. I can
> do a little HTML editing, but JAVA, php, flash, SQL just roll on past me. Anyone
> want to share a little in depth explanation to someone who still uses the cmd prompt
> for some tasks in winder$ 7?
>
> I did have two semesters of SQL in college but never was taught how to connect a
> SQL window to html. Two semesters of COBOL?!? Useless.

The main reason I use RSS feeds is to notify me when new things come out. Currently, I use it to monitor a couple subreddits, a reddit search, a couple webcomics, and this forum. It's much easier than having to monitor each site separately, I just see a little icon appear when there's a new post on one of those locations.

CSS, despite the similar initialism, is completely different. It's basically a list of styles that are applied to a webpage based on certain criteria. For instance, I can use it to mark all HTML elements tagged with an ID of "Bold" so that all their text is bold. Basically, it's an easy way of applying styles to a lot of elements at once, then you just have to define which bits are part of which elements.

As for using the cmd prompt, I work in tech support, and use cmd on a near-daily basis. It's amazing for doing tasks that just take longer in the GUI or aren't as straightfoward. For instance, to create a new user, I have to go through about a dozen different screens via the GUI, or 2 commands in the command prompt. If you want a good reference for what can be done, try http://ss64.com/nt/ It also gives syntax help for writing batch scripts.

[crxbnt]

Gnume:

Thanks for the help!

[nicolai]

Being a Linux user (Linux Mint, to be specific), I do things differently. RSS is simple, and I use the NewsFox extension for Firefox. Works quite well. X-Notifier also works in Firefox. Those are actually o/s agnostic, they're strictly Firefox. Makes it easy, no?

[Spec8472]

I have never truly understood what RSS feeds are. Or, for that matter CSS. I can do a little HTML editing, but JAVA, php, flash, SQL just roll on past me. Anyone want to share a little in depth explanation to someone who still uses the cmd prompt for some tasks in winder$ 7?

I did have two semesters of SQL in college but never was taught how to connect a SQL window to html. Two semesters of COBOL?!? Useless.

RSS is a standard for syndicating content (RSS = "Really Simple Syndication."). That is: it's a way for a site to say "here's our content" in some standardised manner. News sites offer stories, or a summary of the story, the forum offers up recent posts. You use some application (Google Reader, was a good example - but NewsBlur isn't too bad an alternative), and that application takes all the feeds you give it, and periodically goes and checks for content.

CSS is a way of styling html markup. It's a way of separating content, from presentation.
To step back a bit, HTML as a way of marking up content on the page.
You have headers, paragraphs, links, images, and a few other ways of giving context about what the content is. On it's own, that 'bare' marked up content has nothing to indicate how it should be presented.

Back in the 'bad old days' of web development, we would add additional markup for all your presentation information: font, font style, font size, background colours, positioning, etc. Every place in the html where you're changing from one place to another (or even a new paragraph) - you'd repeat that styling information. This lead to huge markup with thousands of repetitions, and made editing html difficult. If you decided to change the font size for a header - you'd have to go back everywhere you had a header and edit the markup.

CSS helps here by letting you specify all your presentation information (again, fonts, background images, alignment, etc) in a style sheet. That style sheet can be a seperate file, or can be included in-line with the page. I can change it in one place and it applies everywhere that uses that style sheet.

The 'C' in CSS is for 'Cascading' (the other two are 'style sheet'), meaning that if I can layer styles, and they inherit values from the parent style. For example, I can style links in a particular way (lets say an underline and in hot pink), and when I have a link inside a header - it'll inherit some of the properties from the header (larger font size, bold, and different font face).

Java and PHP are both programming languages - if you've created batch scripts, they're (kinda) just more advanced versions of this.

These are all pretty much identical:

Code: Select all

Batch: 
echo Hello World

PHP 
print 'Hello World' 

Java 
System.out.println("hello world");

Some languages are optimised towards doing one thing or another, or being easier to learn.

SQL is a query language for accessing and manipulating data in a relational database management system (RDBMS)

There's an official SQL standard, but all the database engines implement their own variations of that. I use Microsoft SQL Server's T-SQL language most frequently.

Examples of what you can do:

The names of the employees who were employed in the last 30 days

Code: Select all

select name from Employees where EmploymentDate > dateadd(dd, 30, getdate()) 

The number of employees in each department

Code: Select all

select Department, count(Id) from Employees group by Department

The top 10 employees by sales this year:

Code: Select all

select top 10 e.name, sum(s.SaleTotal) as TotalSales
from Employees e 
  join Sales s  on s.SalesPersonId = e.Id 
where s.SaleDate >= '2013-01-01'
group by e.Id
order by sum(s.SaleTotal) desc

Give any employee who made at least $5000 this year in sales a 5% pay rise:

Code: Select all

update Employees 
set Salary = Salary * 1.05
from Employees e 
   join (select SalesPersonId, sum(SaleTotal) as TotalSales from Sales where SaleDate >= '2013-01-01') summary on e.Id = summary.SalesPersonId 
where summary.TotalSales >= 5000

I use C# and SQL daily (This is my day job), so I'm pretty comfortable with them.

[Greymist]

Bored at work Spec? That's an impressively detailed post.

But I couldn't help but notice this should be -30

The names of the employees who were employed in the last 30 days

Code: Select all

select name from Employees where EmploymentDate > dateadd(dd, 30, getdate()) 

[Spec8472]

Bored at work Spec? That's an impressively detailed post.

But I couldn't help but notice this should be -30

The names of the employees who were employed in the last 30 days

Code: Select all

select name from Employees where EmploymentDate > dateadd(dd, 30, getdate()) 

Wasn't at work, but thanks...

And... yes, it should've been -30. *le sigh* Bugs, eh?