Small Business Susan

Looking to stay up to date on stuff like Security… stuff like Admin’ing networks?

Truly where a lot of great information lies in today is…right here.. in a blog.  It’s another ‘been there, done that’ person like yourself, saying ‘hey this worked for me’.

So what is a blog?  It’s really nothing more than an easy way to post to a web page..but rather than G-O-I-N-G to the web page all the time, you use a newsreader to ‘suck’ in the posts so you can read them in a reader…now mind you… I still say that blogs work the best while you are online, because I personally know that I add links and what not and if you are stuck in an airplane without an internet connection…it’s a little hard to follow a link…but anyway… so read this first… that’s right…go follow the link… and when you are done..come back….

I’ll just kinda hang around here until you are done…

la di dah….

Okay back?  Did you go get a newsreader?  You didn’t?

Well go back and get one…and THEN come back here when you are ready to sign up for some blog feeds…

Good.. Okay now lets get you signed up for some RSS feeds.  If you are using something like Newsgator…whenever you see an orange XML [and for the record.. I disagree with Microsoft’s page where they say when you see an  RSS icon you can click… they don’t consistently do that and it’s an XML icon anyway… geeze..what’s with standards…I mean the IE7 team is getting on the bandwagon…anyway… when you see …I guess ANY orange tag like that, right mouse click and see if you can ‘subscribe in Newsgator” and voila ..that web page is now straight into a feed reader brought to you automagically so you don’t have to go hunting for it….

Some of my fav’s include….

• The Master MVP blog – as this covers all sorts of things like Security from Donna, latest threats from Harry, X64 computing, and enough French culture from Christain to keep me entertained…
  
• The rest of the Top Ten Useful Microsoft Blogs listed here…definitely the EHLO blog on Exchange, the MSRC blog on Security.
  
• TechNet blogs [which are my fav over the MSDN ones..sorry] – http://blogs.technet.com/ all blogs here are more IT admin’y related
  
• MSDN Blogs – http://blogs.msdn.com/ all the more “Dev’“ Related blogs are here
  
• Dana’s blog – http://silverstr.ufies.org/blog He and I will be presenting on SBS/hardening/security guides.. oh just paranoid stuff at SMBnation.com
  
• SeanDaniel.com’s blog – [yes poor guy is probably going to have to legally change his name to SeanDaniel.com with as much as I call him that]

Oh … I cannot let this list go by without a major callout about this one….

http://www.thundermain.com/rss/

Go ahead and click on it… ugly isn’t it?  It has to be my most powerful RSS feed that I have.  It has a simple job… it watches the Microsoft Download page and alerts me to new content.  That’s it.  And yet, for a while there I had a couple of Microsoft employees wondering just how I was finding out about Security patches moments before they did up in Redmond…and it was all because of that feed.  It would hit my feed reader before they were getting it in their mailbox.

You probably have to manually copy and paste it into your feed reader, but if you do no others..do that ONE right there.

I have lots and lots more …and should probably stick the master listing [called the OPML file] somewhere for people to look at but until then…. even though I’ve covered this topic before and others have shared their RSS feeds… I thought I’d remind people how easy it is to keep up to date with RSS.