Complimentary software (services) make life easier

For the last 3 months I've had access to broadband during the daytime (in a friend's house, my new 'office') but revert to using dial-up in the evenings back here in my own home. And now that I've terminated my flat-rate UTVip account I need to drastically reduce my dial-up connection time. That means finding an alternative to my RSS aggregator of choice - Bloglines.com for evening use. And what better than an RSS aggregator that synchronises with my Bloglines account - FeedDemon. They work great together.

Here's the routine. The last thing I do each day before leaving the 'office' is close my Bloglines window in Firefox and launch FeedDemon, which immediately sucks down all my unread Bloglines RSS items. I can thus spend all the time I want in the evening, offline, going through those posts and flagging the ones which demand further reading. Then, last thing at night, I hit the flag filter so as to only show all the items I've marked earlier and drag and drop those post title links to my Textpad editor.

Finally, I run two Textpad macros I've created to HTMLise those links and save as a web page. First thing I do the following morning back in the broadband blessed 'office' it open that local HTML page and right click to bring up the Linky menu, then open each URL in a separate Firefox tab. I regularly open up to 30 tabs which isn't a problem with 512Mb RAM.

Bloglines, FeedDemon, Firefox and Linky - what a great combination.

Comments

[bob]

simply use o2.ie as your dialup isp which still maintains a list of local dialup numbers (UUnet). then signup to UTV Talk which gives you free local off-peak calls. hey presto. totally free offpeak dial-up internet

following link has a pop-up window with all the local numbers.
the old ISP CD had
username is [email protected]
password is guest
(or your standard o2.ie details if you have one.

http://web.o2.ie/personal/help/connecting_to_the_internet/pc_laptop.jsp

[James Corbett]

What?!?! Does that really work Bob? God, I can't believe I didn't hear about that previously.... before I initiated my move back to eircom last week!!

Damn! :-(

[bob]

yes it works - using it myself - as i can't get broadband here. UTV Talk is totally free UK & Ireland offpeak and weekend calls to landline numbers. (www.u.tv/talk). Call must be not > 1hr, so hangup & redial if you're on longer than that.