Blogs and RSS and Notes

Why is this Domino Blog not hosted by Domino?
Good question. The main reason is that I don't own our domino server, My employer does.
I know that Domino is a very capable blog hosting system and there's plenty of blogs out there that use it... but, while I'm reasonably sure that my employer wouldn't be too concerned about hosting a small blog I'm not willing to take the risk.

blogger.com is free, flexible and works rather well, so I'm happy enough here.

What is this RSS stuff and what is it good for?
Put simply, RSS is a way of downloading the headings and a small extract of text on blog sites. If you have an RSS Reader, then you can easily look through the recent postings without them cluttering up your mailbox.

Where can I get an RSS Feed Reader?
You can get these apps all over the net, but in my case I wanted a Lotus Notes based one.

I looked a few Lotus Notes RSS Feed Readers and finally settled on one called News Miner from Digital Insites.

This product is free and works rather well.
http://digitalinsites.gotdns.com/site.nsf/products

The only drawback with this product is that it currently can't read ATOM XML RSS Feeds, like the ones produced by blogger. I've emailed the author, Michael Wagner, and have been told that he's working on it.

I'm happy with the rest of the product, so I'm happy to wait at this stage.

RSS Feed from this Blog
Until today, I didn't know that this blog was producing a feed. I've now adjusted it to use extracts rather than the whole text and will produce some links.

The first of these links is here.

Comments

Martin Humpolec said…

Gavin, don't you have some working address to download this software? Thank you

12:06 pm

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly. It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3. I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified. A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents. A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher

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