How do I do the News Monitor? It's actually a simple operation done in three applications.
NetNewsWire is my RSS reader, which feeds me a frenzy of news items from not only the world of television but from the technology and video games industries and a mix of world, national, and local news, as well as The Consumerist, my personal favorite consumer/customer problems site. The two most used feeds include Broadcasting and Cable and Multichannel News, but I will bring in a story from Gizmodo or The Consumerist as I see fit. Inside NetNewsWire, there's also an EKB smart list, which holds items with "Dish", "satellite", or other relevant keywords. I click on a feed item to read it in detail and get its URL.
Once I see the news items, it's to Dreamweaver, which holds the code for the News Monitor's pages. I write the code by hand myself (the News Monitor has been an exercise in using HTML and CSS too!) using mostly the a, h2, h3, strong, and p tags. BobaBird, whom I am meeting today in person (!), is the EKB's resident code-cleaner.
I save my Dreamweaver work when I'm done and hand it off to Cyberduck. Before the EKB moved off of DBSTalk servers, we used normal FTP; I (much to my relief) learned that Cyberduck also does secure FTP (which is what we use now). Cyberduck beams it up to the site, and then it reaches you in your Web browser. Early on, I used FileZilla to do my FTP work, though my switch to Cyberduck occurred before our switch to SFTP.
NetNewsWire and Cyberduck are Mac programs, and Cyberduck is produced by a guy in Switzerland (support the little shack, not the big giant!).
And that's the News Monitor. Other tools I use include the W3C validator (a time-saving thing) and Mail.app (the Mac built-in mail client) to read both my personal email and EKB tipline. (The address at echostaruser.com feeds into its own Gmail inbox.)
With my job as EKB News Monitor Proprietor, I also handle the EKB's news archives, some of which were written by EKB founder jbuff. (The EKB has a rich history, and I'm only a slice of it.)
NetNewsWire is my RSS reader, which feeds me a frenzy of news items from not only the world of television but from the technology and video games industries and a mix of world, national, and local news, as well as The Consumerist, my personal favorite consumer/customer problems site. The two most used feeds include Broadcasting and Cable and Multichannel News, but I will bring in a story from Gizmodo or The Consumerist as I see fit. Inside NetNewsWire, there's also an EKB smart list, which holds items with "Dish", "satellite", or other relevant keywords. I click on a feed item to read it in detail and get its URL.
Once I see the news items, it's to Dreamweaver, which holds the code for the News Monitor's pages. I write the code by hand myself (the News Monitor has been an exercise in using HTML and CSS too!) using mostly the a, h2, h3, strong, and p tags. BobaBird, whom I am meeting today in person (!), is the EKB's resident code-cleaner.
I save my Dreamweaver work when I'm done and hand it off to Cyberduck. Before the EKB moved off of DBSTalk servers, we used normal FTP; I (much to my relief) learned that Cyberduck also does secure FTP (which is what we use now). Cyberduck beams it up to the site, and then it reaches you in your Web browser. Early on, I used FileZilla to do my FTP work, though my switch to Cyberduck occurred before our switch to SFTP.
NetNewsWire and Cyberduck are Mac programs, and Cyberduck is produced by a guy in Switzerland (support the little shack, not the big giant!).
And that's the News Monitor. Other tools I use include the W3C validator (a time-saving thing) and Mail.app (the Mac built-in mail client) to read both my personal email and EKB tipline. (The address at echostaruser.com feeds into its own Gmail inbox.)
With my job as EKB News Monitor Proprietor, I also handle the EKB's news archives, some of which were written by EKB founder jbuff. (The EKB has a rich history, and I'm only a slice of it.)
